12/7/2024
When Elizabeth Wurtzel was 27 when she published the book Prozac Nation in 1994. She died of cancer in 2020.
In order to determine if Elizabeth Wurtzel was the character in the story The Depressed Person by David Foster Wallace I looked at three points about her life:
-Her relationship with her Therapist Doctor Diana Sterling
-Her relationship with female friends
-Her summer camp or some type of boarding school that was equestrian in nature
The Depressed Person it can be found online for free or it’s inside the book called Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. I’m not going to give away any spoilers for the story. It’s only a couple pages including some footnotes. The Depressed Person is unnamed. Please read it first from the link above from Harper’s Magazine.
Did her therapist tell her that the best way to solve her problems was to have a phone list of supported female friends which she would consider her support network whom she would be encouraged to call when she felt depressed instead of calling her therapist? Anyone could easily see the therapist merely doesn’t want to talk to her off the clock. I could not find any information about her relationship with her psychiatrist, but in the book Prozac Nation she speaks very highly of her and credits her for saving her life.
When I looked Elizabeth Wurtzel’s female friends it turned out she didn’t have any. Her best female friends were actually her dogs or she said something like this. She even spoke in one of her essays about friends not really being necessary and how her best friend is actually a friend that she knew from law school. But this friend is in the middle of raising children that is like too busy obviously to talk to her constantly if she needs help. Furthermore she was not the kind of person who would submitted to being told to call other for help.
The third thing was the summer camp experience. Elizabeth Wurtzel writes that she had to go to summer camp every summer and she didn’t want to go because she would have actually do activities and make friends instead of just being a chaotic individual spinning with no sense of purpose. This is probably why her mother kept insisting on sending her to the summer camp even though she didn’t want to go to the summer camp. Her mother just wanted to get her out of the house because they did not get along. In the Book Prozac Nation there’s no mention of horses or any boarding schools. She failed to describe her summer camps. There’s no information at all that she liked to ride horses or that she had ever gone to a boarding school or a summer camp that features horseback riding as part of the curriculum.
Therefore based on these three questions, I’m going to say that Elizabeth Wurtzel is not the person in the short story The Depressed Person.
I found more information posted by people online that in the biography of David Foster Wallace Every Love Story is a Ghost Story people said that Elizabeth Wurtzel is the person whom he wrote the short story The Depressed Person about. However, when I looked up her name in the Kindle edition of the book Brief Interviews with Hideous Men David Foster Wallace never mentioned her name in conjunction with the story. Although he did know her and they would sometimes talk on the phone and they exchanged at least two letters. He said he had never been her lover. There was something I found that said he tried to come up to her apartment after something that they had done together and she didn’t invite him up.
When it came time to lose her virginity at age 19 she selected an older man who I’m not going to name out of modesty. Then she wrote about it posted about it and told everyone about it. I think nobody published it because it was bad taste. It seems pretty clear to me that if she had been a lover of David Foster Wallace there would be no reason why she wouldn’t want to talk about that and come clean because she said she lived all of her life in total honesty. However she was actually terminated for some writing jobs for making up source quotes rather than looking for them.
I found a “mistake” in Prozac Nation where she attributes something to the Philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Upon looking up Spinoza’s life on Wikipedia this incident never happened. It seems to me like she just wanted to name drop Spinoza but I don’t really think she knew very much about his philosophy. Baruch Spinoza was the favorite philosopher of the character Jeeves from the books by PG Wodehouse about the characters Jeeves and Wooster.
She admitted that she did not want to grow up and she wants to be an endless rebel. I guess she achieved that. She never did grow up. She lived life on her own terms. She wasn’t a brilliant writer she just got lucky with one book. She was lazy when it came to doing research or taking time to polish her craft. I never read her book Prozac Nation when it came out. I wasn’t aware of it. Instead I read the book Listening to Prozac.
Unfortunately Prozac did not solve her problems. At the end of the book she puts in a lot of philosophy about how everyone in the nation should be on Prozac. We could be like a Prozac Nation. After she received her Prozac she couldn’t possibly wait for it to work so she attempted suicide before it worked. This suicide attempt was more like a gesture because she did it somewhere where someone would find her. She even asked for electroshock therapy similar to Carrie Fisher who actually went through with the electroshock therapy.
As I read her articles in magazines such as New York Magazine and The Cut she applied a Literary technique which I call the knockout punch. She would make some highly confessional self incriminating statement then she would follow it up by softening it and adding something like “it’s all right everything works out.” While reading an article by Elizabeth Wurtzel reader is getting assaulted by dopamine hits of potentially interesting or shocking information. Then she decides to soften those hits to make them less interesting. She moves on to another point and then comes up with another punch followed by softening statements. For example “My father wasn’t my real father so I’m a bastard.” These are harsh words, so she softens them up later on in the essay. Her books have been called a catalog of bad behavior. I was interested in reading her writing which is engaging. I am not sure how much is truthful and how seriously I should be taking her words. Her books sound like a satire about an addict who has only a Hoover for a nose. Using her nose to snort up as many drugs as she could get, Wurtzel damaged her nose tissue. The publishers quote from the book More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction published in 2001 below:
“I crush up my pills and snort them like dust. They are my sugar. They are the sweetness in the days that have none. They drip through me like tupelo honey. Then they are gone. Then I need more. I always need more. For all of my life I have needed more.”
Wurtzel was ahead of the curve. Now anyone can read drug taking confessions on Reddit for free.
Even the Yale Review of Books gave her a negative review. Yale was where went to law school. She went to both Harvard and Yale. She presumably worked for a man who was a friend of hers who was a lawyer, but she didn’t practice law. Wurtzel was given a title of something like special operations agent. In 2012 even that job became too much work and she quit in order to concentrate on writing. Wurtzel was not depressed. I don’t think she was ever depressed. Her depression was only an excuse to justify her real issue Malignant Narcissism. Therefore, I don’t see how she could have been the Depressed Person in the David Foster Wallace story.
Professional writers were resentful how how this untalented person who did not even work hard to hone her craft was allowed to write articles for all the most popular magazines. This obviously did not sit very well with them. Elizabeth Wurtzel faced a lot of online criticism. I don’t want to criticize somebody who has died from cancer. I think a lot of people also feel this way. My goal is to be objective without being critical. I hope this comes through in the article.
I have sources for all of these points. Leave me a comment or contact me, if you are interesting in my sources.
Macy Makes Magic 