Was this me, all the time, or could this be fixed? What was it, anyhow, that needed fixing? I had read William Styron’s memoir of his depression, Darkness Visible, when it came out in 1989, my final year in college it’s a book I still admire, yet Styron’s life was so far removed from mine that it was hard to find a real echo of my suffering in its pages. I, too, had lived with depression, with the mysterious shadow that was either a part of myself or beyond myself, I could never quite tell. Michiko Kakutani, writing in the New York Times, admitted to wanting to shake the author: “There are far worse fates than growing up during the 70s in New York and going to Harvard.” Yet Kakutani also praised “her forthrightness, her humour and her ability to write sparkling, luminescent prose”.Īnd it was those qualities that struck me when I read the book – at 27, as it happens, for Wurtzel was just a few months older than I am. “Prozac Nation is being hyped as a tract on youthful angst in the 90s, but it reads more like the self-absorbed rantings of an adolescent,” ran a review in Newsweek. Not everyone was convinced that Wurtzel’s introspection had much value to anyone beyond herself.
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