“Prozac Nation” Author Comes Back to College, An Interview with Elizabeth Wurtzel

By Mike Vilensky

Elizabeth Wurtzel’s cellular phone is ringing, and she doesn’t want to deal with it. “If it keeps ringing, I’ll turn it off,” she says, and then continues talking about the state of the pharmaceutical industry to a room full of NYU undergrads. But the ringing is persistent Mum dad download. Finally, she picks up her phone and groans. “Ugh, it’s my ex-boyfriend. He has a habit of calling twenty-two times in a row, so if I don’t turn it off now, it’s just going to keep ringing.” Empathetic twenty-year olds giggle. The professor, CNN’s Phil Rosenbaum, tries to get the conversation back to a less dramatic note: “At least he stays in touch…” But Wurtzel just tosses the phone; it falls into a chic handbag on a classroom seat. She smiles. “Where was I?”

The 41-year old with the persistent ex-boyfriend is the author of Prozac Nation and Bitch. More recently, she penned a controversial homage to the late David Foster Wallace for New York magazine.

And also, oddly, graduated from Yale Law School. She now does civil litigation for David Boies, the lawyer who represented Al Gore in Gore v. Bush; America, in the US v. Microsoft.

Despite her literary talent, pervasive depression, suicide attempts, brushes with fame, and encounters with notoriety, Ms. Wurtzel is now a successful and seemingly stable adult working in a powerful attorney’s office.

Wurtzel strolled into the business journalism class last week for something of a class-wide interview, and later corresponded with Local via e-mail. Too young to really know the author for the acclaim and infamy she achieved in the ’90s, most of the students in the class had only the knowledge of Wurtzel that they garnered from a Google search: a shaky Wikipedia bio that included unsympathetic 9/11 quotes, and an unclear relationship with Gawker that involved the epithet “cokehead slut.” Before Wurtzel walked in, a few aspiring journalists even half-joked about asking her “So, why’d you do it?” in reference to her allegedly plagiarizing stories for the Dallas Morning News.

But then Wurtzel did walk in: big lips, blonde hair, and those famously round eyes, still a cross between come hither and droopy. On her wrist, she donned an enormous, gold Michael Kors timepiece. On her shoulders, a dramatic fur coat. “I promise it’s vintage,” she told us. “Even PETA is okay with vintage fur, because at least then the animal’s death wasn’t in vain.”

For a four hour lecture, Wurtzel suddenly seemed like an interesting interview. Twenty years after the “psychodrama” she lived through at Harvard, ostensibly now winning the battle versus the “black wave” of depression she once described, a room of college students, she found, is still an audience she can connect with.

Interview after the jump.

Are you more of a writer or more of a lawyer now?

I think I just am a writer. I’m always in my head writing something. Whereas I don’t have voices in my head telling me ‘call this witness.’ I don’t know if you’re a very devoted accountant, you ever start dreaming of spreadsheets. But when you’re devoted to writing, it never leaves your head.

What’s your writing process right now?

I haven’t written anything in a while because I was, in theory, studying for the bar. And so I was at least making a show of not writing anything because I was studying. In truth, I might as well have been writing something.

Where did you write Prozac Nation?

I was at my friend’s parents’ house, to begin with. They live down in Florida, and that was really strange, because they had a condominium, it was maybe like a two-bedroom condominium, and it wasn’t idyllic at all. It was in Boca Raton. Which, if you know what it’s like there, it’s not exactly a writer’s haven. I’d get up in the morning and write for a while on their kitchen table, and if I was good I’d get to go to the Town Center Mall for the afternoon. That was kind of how I motivated myself. I would write for a few hours, and then I would go to the mall. So it doesn’t have to be perfect. I think that some place like Yaddo or the MacDowell Colony would really depress me, because you couldn’t go shopping. There’d just be no reward at the end of the day; there’d be no fun thing that you do.

Were you still going through depressive issues while writing Prozac Nation?

I have always and probably will always, in some way, struggle with depression.

Did you come up with the title of Prozac Nation?

It was the name of a chapter, and then my editor thought it should be the title. I wanted the book to be called “I Hate Myself and I Want To Die.” And everybody was against that! I thought it was pretty good. I still think it was pretty good. I’m working on something now that I want to call “Failure,” and my editor said ‘that’s so depressing.’ It’s interesting how people think about titles.

What was your thought process when you were selling Prozac Nation?

It was so strange — -nobody really cared whether it got published or not. I don’t remember it being a burning thing. I didn’t have much of a plan. I don’t think I ever imagined that it was going to be published.

How did you feel about the reactions to the book?

It did seem like some people were terribly angry about something about the book, and I could never figure out what that was. But I always felt like if they knew me, they wouldn’t necessarily like me, but they would realize that it wasn’t worth the trouble of being so annoyed. I have to take the trash out, I have to make my bed everyday. My life was pretty much like anybody else’s — -it still is.

How do you feel about the movie?

I didn’t like the movie. It was factually accurate but I don’t think it had the spirit of the book. It had no humor. The director so clearly didn’t get the milieu, so he should have just made it the story of someone depressed somewhere else under a different set of circumstances. Cristina Ricci was good; the thing that was bad was the script. It was a terrible script. I can’t say enough bad things about the script.

When you go back to your previous works, do you feel like a completely different person?

No, it doesn’t seem like a different person. I probably wouldn’t write it now, but it still seems like me. When I look at Prozac Nation, it seems like a pretty sloppy book to me. But it’s perfect for what I was trying to do then. I think it seems true to the experience that I was trying to convey at the time, and all I was trying to do was be authentic.

Did the book’s success change your life?

Not really. Not that much changes. I have relatives, aunts and uncles, who think “Thank God she went to law school, because now maybe she’ll be okay.”

What do you think about the pharmaceutical industry now?

When I was your age, or a little younger, you could tell doctors that you feel chemicals bouncing around in your head, and they’d say ‘no, you just need twenty years of therapy.’ They really didn’t give out medication until you were already in the hospital. But now you have the opposite problem, that you need therapy, and people just hand you medication. Both things are kind of a way of not taking the problem seriously. Like suddenly all these people are bipolar. That’s a really rare problem, to be bipolar. But whatever medication they have that works for something, they attach a disease to, because these diseases are all so similar, frankly.

At the same time there are people who need medication who are now getting it, so I think it’s a net gain. And then there are even people who just want medication, and who can say that it isn’t fine? If it’s not hurting them and they feel better, is there just a moral qualm about that?

Do you have friends who are artists or writers that motivate you?

I used to know a lot of writers and we’d hang out but I did feel like we were all very depressed and that it was not necessarily the healthiest thing.

Why were all your friends depressed?

It’s an occupational hazard, I think.

Did they have chemical imbalances?

I don’t know that they were literally depressed.

Some of that was fun. There have been times in my life when I really liked that. But an awful lot of my friends who at one time were editors at Spin magazine like went and got MBAs and now have software companies. There’s something wearying about writing. It’s a very hard life. So there’s any number of people I know who just lost their devotion to it.

Then there are the people who got married and moved to Brooklyn. Which is like, to me, this unfortunate thing that happens to people. And they’re all so happy! Everyone who lives in Brooklyn is happy. They like it. It’s a happy place. They’re completely happy. So I’m probably just wrong about this. But it’s become this determination on my part, like it’s Kabul, Afghanistan before it’s Cobble Hill. I can’t hear one more time that Brooklyn is the new Manhattan or just anything like that.

What motivates you to write?

Nowadays, I tend to write about current events, so I’m motivated by something that happened, that I can’t believe they’ve mistaken this for a good idea. I’ll tell you something that I haven’t written about but it’s driving me crazy — -all these potential Obama cabinet nominees, and right now there’s only one person working in the Treasury Dept., because everybody who he wants to nominate has a tax problem. The take-home that everybody’s been getting, all these nominees don’t pay their taxes, is the wrong message. The message should be: the tax system is a mess! Nobody knows how to pay their taxes. Everybody that I know that doesn’t have taxes deducted from their payroll check every week is in trouble with the IRS. I mean these are people who worry about what the public thinks about them, so how bad could it be for somebody who doesn’t care? Think about what they’re doing. I took tax law when I was in law school so I can tell you that the code is crazy. It’s really insane.

Your stuff is pretty racy. I’m surprised to see you so calm. From the way you write and from past interviews — -you’re a very outspoken person. But you seem very chill tonight.

[Long pause]

Oh. [Pause] Uhh… [pause] well. I think I’m fine.

What happens if you’re going on a date and somebody Googles your name?

Well… I don’t know. But people do that to everybody now. Everybody’s so publicly rendered, so it’s not just me. I would say there’s a reasonable balance. If I were to date somebody who weren’t at all interested in my writing, I would feel like that person doesn’t really like me at all, because it’s still part of me. But if somebody were too interested in it, it would also seem like they don’t like me at all, and they like something else. It’s that the person’s not getting who you are; not that they don’t know what you do.

Why did you switch to law?

When I was writing full-time, I wasn’t doing that much writing. I was mostly sitting around, walking my dog. I was wasting a lot of time. I ended up with this feeling that there was something else I could be doing to keep from wasting so much time.

Writers who have absolutely nothing else to do except write — -I think it’s hard. Unless you just have that personality. And I don’t know what makes you have that personality but I think it might be a form of, like, sociopathy. I don’t think it’s normal to be able to totally motivate yourself in a room alone all the time.

What motivated you to go to law school?

There were the little indignities about life that I thought ‘if I were a lawyer, this wouldn’t happen.’ And it happens to be true. There’s a lot of things that happen on a daily basis that you wonder, ‘is this illegal or is it just annoying?’ And now I know it’s usually just annoying. But there’s not a single instance in life where you’re not better off knowing what the law is.

And I always wanted to go to law school. Renata Adler went to Yale Law School, so it was particularly there. And I always thought that it would be cool to do the same thing, but I never thought I could do it. I never thought I could take the LSATs or do the things you have to do to go to law school. And then there was a point in my life, some time after 9/11, when I was very sick of everything. I was very sick of everything I was trying to write, and I didn’t feel like writing anything anymore. There was nothing much going on in my life. There was nothing I felt like doing. There was a book I was supposed to write, I couldn’t get it done.

Was it in response to 9/11?

Well I lived opposite the World Trade Center, and my apartment had gotten wrecked. When the towers fell over, they fell on my building. My ceiling had caved in when the building crashed on my roof. I was in my apartment at the time it happened. So I was very scared by everything that had happened. I had been displaced, and I had a really hard time. I was in quite a bit of shock. I was astonished by about twenty different things having to do with that. It’s very strange emotional experience when an international event happens in your neighborhood; when something that changes the face of the world happens across the street.

I didn’t feel like moving after that. I felt like sitting in front of my TV and watching C-SPAN all day. And it felt like, this is the moment to go to law school. I felt like I was really wasting my life. I was having a conversation in my own head, and I felt like everybody around me was fairly irrational. And I felt like if I went to law school, people would be rational. And I was right about that. People are rational to a fault at law school.

In one interview you described 9/11 as someone pulling a turtleneck on.

It was an amazing thing to see — -it was shocking. When they imploded, it was if they were built to implode. Apparently they were, as it turns out. But who knew that? I remember just being mesmerized. It had been so chaotic and everything was blowing everywhere, so when it folded in on itself, aesthetically, it was almost calming — it was strangely designed to do this. It was very still, time froze. It was really creepy. And very upsetting. The whole thing was just creepy and upsetting. To say I had never seen anything like it is not an exaggeration.

What do you do in your free time?

I watch Law & Order re-runs. I’m actually over SVU. I’m into the originals. I also watch a lot of PBS, which I’m embarrassed about, because I think there’s something really middlebrow about it. But I’ve learned so much from it, like I learned all about evolution, all these things I didn’t know.

You’ve had trouble with the Bar.

I don’t like that test. I have definite problem with the Bar. I feel that we misunderstand each other. I feel that it needs to understand me more than I need to learn to understand it, but I don’t think it agrees.

Are you going to take it again?

I don’t know.

Do you follow popular culture?

I actually just watched the E! True Hollywood Story on the Kardashians, and I saw what was so fascinating about them. I don’t want to get involved — I have too many things I’m involved in, like my TV shows, and it ruins my life, and I could see that this one could really ruin your life. But her mother wants her to pose for Playboy. Like, what is that?! When did that happen? I just thought, ‘that’s amazing.’ Because they seem like a nice family, in a weird way. They do seem like kind of a nice family except they end up in odd situations and they don’t go to college. But it seems like they don’t go to college though not because they’re not nice but almost because they’re old-fashioned. They all seem to live at home.

What about Octomom?

What is that about? What does that say? She’s had octuplets, and six others. I think the doctor who implanted her with these octuplets should be forced to have sex with her for the rest of his life. They should make a sex tape. That would definitely solve things.

Do you read gossip magazines?

What is the good one to read? Is it Us? Which one is the best gossip one? What about Life & Style? There was Star, but Bonnie Fuller took over and made it classy. And In Touch is the same deal? I just can’t keep up, but I do find it fun. Do you know why all that is protected by the First Amendment? Because it’s important that there be common conversation topics for people, or else we’d have no sense of community. So In Touch serves a higher good.

Photos courtesy of Elizabeth Wurtzel, Additional reporting by Lisa Qiu, Brandon Feldman, Ashleigh Stephan, and Damon Beres.