Special Issue: Elizabeth Wurtzel

Abstract

This Special Issue was prompted by Elizabeth Wurtzel’s death in January 2019, from complications of breast cancer. Its articles constitute a form of commemoration of her literary work throughout her life, and are conceived as testimony to its value and continued influence. Despite the sense of loss expressed in the wake of Wurtzel’s death, that value and influence has not been widely agreed upon, or even much evidenced, in scholarship over the decades following the period of Wurtzel’s greatest visibility (or notoriety), from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s. Her death has galvanised our efforts to not only appraise Wurtzel’s literary achievements but to do our part to make sure they are not unjustifiably rendered obscure. People tend to know Wurtzel via her autobiography, Prozac Nation (1994) and its sequel More, Now, Again (2002); the former is widely credited as an important and early, even inaugurating, example of the ‘misery memoir’ and the ‘memoir boom’ of the late 1990s and early twenty-first century. Wurtzel has been celebrated for the candid way she wrote about depression, which was particularly admired by her Generation X peers and young women readers. Yet, as many of the contributors here note, Wurtzel and her writing were regarded by reviewers and readers alike as self-involved, frustrating and difficult. Reception of Wurtzel’s work suffered from such characterisations in ways that works by her male peers did not. This dynamic persists today; it is difficult to think of a contemporary woman autobiographer whose work is considered with the reverence Karl Ove Knausgaard’s works received, for example. While the sexist reviews she received partly accounts for the fact that Wurtzel’s work has been undeservedly ignored or forgotten, this does not tell the full story. It is also partly because a focus on her rebellious behaviour, or understanding of her as a celebrity, may have obscured focus on the detail of her work. We argue that the provocations and complexities of her work deserve greater scrutiny (and praise). Wurtzel does indeed deserve credit for ‘writing out’ about depression and mental health when these were stigmatised (of course, they still often are today) but such understandings do not fully address her thoughtful participation in and influence on various discourses about gender, writing, illness, music and American culture at the end of the twentieth century. In many ways her work anticipates or can be understood in relation to some features of the twenty-first century too, such as the role of social media and its relationship to autobiography and performance, and debates over the impact and legacy of the 1990s.