Elizabeth Wurtzel

Elizabeth Lee Wurtzel (July 31, 1967 – January 7, 2020) was an American writer, journalist, and lawyer known for the confessional memoir Prozac Nation, which she published at the age of 27. Her work often focused on chronicling her personal struggles with depression, addiction, career, and relationships. Wurtzel's work drove a boom in confessional writing and the personal memoir genre during the 1990s, and she was viewed as a voice of Generation X. In her later life, Wurtzel worked briefly as an attorney before her death from breast cancer.

Early life

Wurtzel grew up in a Jewish family on the Upper West Side of New York City and attended the Ramaz School. Her parents, Lynne Winters and Donald Wurtzel, divorced when she was young, and Wurtzel was primarily raised by her mother, who worked in publishing and as a media consultant. In a 2018 article in The Cut, Wurtzel wrote that she discovered in 2016 that her biological father was photographer Bob Adelman, who had worked with her mother in the 1960s.

As described in her memoir Prozac Nation, Wurtzel's depression began between the ages of 10 and 12. Wurtzel admitted to cutting herself when she was in adolescence, and of spending her teenage years in an environment of emotional angst, substance misuse, bad relationships, and frequent fights with family members. A gifted student with family wealth, Wurtzel went on to attend Harvard College, where she continued to struggle with depression and substance abuse.

Early career

While an undergraduate at Harvard in the late 1980s, Wurtzel wrote for The Harvard Crimson and received the 1986 Rolling Stone College Journalism Award for a piece about Lou Reed.