Many of the original reviews were negative, and offered valid critical perspectives on the book. Each chapter begins with an epigraph from someone like Albert Einstein, Sylvia Plath, or Edith Wharton. It’s full of florid language, sweeping generalizations, and an obsessive, unproductive introspection. Prozac Nation is a young person’s book, both in terms of its author and its target audience. Whether we like it or not, Prozac Nation really did change the landscape when it comes to the way women write about themselves. But by the end of the prologue - titled, with extreme subtlety and nuance, “I Hate Myself And I Want To Die” - I was hooked. For another, I was skeptical that the beautiful girl on the cover, with her clear skin and artfully messy hair, could know anything about my ugly life. For one thing, I’d actually been on Prozac for the previous three years, so reading it seemed a little too clichéd. It had been out for nearly a decade, but up until then I’d resisted it. My answer - everything made me feel bad anyway, and I just couldn’t help it - seemed insufficient even to me.Ī few weeks after the party crying incident, I found a copy of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation at a secondhand bookstore. My friends were exasperated and wanted to know why I couldn’t just stop doing things that made me feel bad.
I just couldn’t differentiate between the immediate relief of dissolving into tears and the long-term gratification of cultivating emotional continence - probably because I no longer believed I had a future. I went from being an occasional downer to a wailing banshee party-ruiner. There had been the breakup, then I’d lost my housing situation, and finally, financial problems had forced me to drop out of school. I’d always been an over-emotional cryer, but that year was a personal nadir when it came to mental health. I knew that I should stop and go home, but I couldn’t my feelings were huge and immediate the thought of being alone was unbearable. I made the rounds of the party, rehashing my misery to anyone who would listen: how my ex had broken my heart, how I was certain that I was an unloveable failure, how I thought about killing myself. When he finally managed to extricate himself, I found his best friend and did the same to him.
When I was 20, I cornered my ex-boyfriend in his bedroom during a party and cried on him for two hours, leaving a watery mascara stain down the front of his shirt. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.Īnne Thériault | Longreads | September 2019 | 6 minutes (1,607 words)
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