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46 of 47 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
TRUST ME -- the book is EXCELLENT, February 28, 2007
This review is from: More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction (Paperback)
What prompted me to write a review for this book was how much I love it, and how many bad reviews its gotten. People say Wurtzel is selfish, narcissistic, self-centered, and completely focused only on herself and her own life. YES folks, it's a memoir about HER life and HER drug addiction. What people don't understand is that depression and addiction are two VERY self-centering things. Depression is, in its nature, the inability to get out of onesself in order to exist in the world. I am, like Wurtzel, an only child. I was also an addict and I also suffered from depression. I think you need to really understand what it is like to endure these things before you can truly comprehend that she is not a bratty woman, still looking for her mommy and daddy's affections -- as critics will have you believe -- she was suffering, and she bleeds her heart open to you, the reader, in ALL her books. She spares nothing, she embarasses herself, humiliates herself, she is not saying I am Elizabeth Wurtzel and I have no flaws, I am perfect. She is saying, I am Elizabeth Wurtzel and THESE are my flaws, THESE are my imperfections, perhaps you can learn from them. It's a MEMOIR folks, it's ALL gonna be about HER life and HER gripes, and HER suffering. That's not narcissism. That's honesty.
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30 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Read this BEFORE reading "Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women", August 5, 2005
This review is from: More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction (Paperback)
It's funny, but every Elizabeth Wurtzel review I've read (including reviews on Prozac Nation the film) is one extreme or the other. The people who trash her work always whine about the same things: it's self-absorbed, she's a brat, omg my friend's-brother's-nephew's-playmate's-mother's-hairdresser went through like WAY WORSE STUFF THAN HER!!!111
Look, folks, this a writer whose first novel was her memoirs about depression. Depressed people and addicts are not pleasant to be around. They're frustrating, demanding, unreliable, irritating and they make you want to scream at them to make them "normal". That seems to be the biggest problem that people have with her books - she doesn't sugarcoat anything and she doesn't try to make depression or addiction look glamourous. If this doesn't sound like something that will interest you, don't even bother reading it, because I can guarantee that you'll hate it.
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36 of 44 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Reading Wurtzel's two memoirs paints a fascinating portrait (whether or not you like her on a personal level), December 13, 2005
This review is from: More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction (Paperback)
Wurtzel's second memoir is account of her fall into Ritalin addiction (crushing and snorting the pills) and then cocaine addiction, all while writing her bestseller Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women. She isolated herself in Florida, obsessively writing and re-writing drafts of her book. She freely admitted her addition and planned to get clean "as soon as the book was done." She convinced friends and family to look the other way as she used drug in front of them. At one low point before her first stint in rehab, she was essentially living at the NY Doubleday offices, disheveled, attempting to edit her book, and having cocaine delivered to the lobby by courier service. It was amazing what a large scale she got codependency to work for her.
Wurtzel enters rehab, lives in a halfway house, relapses, and tries alternate forms of treatment on the long road to sobriety. At one point, she finally gets a therapist who pushes her beyond her eloquent speech and word play. Wurtzel has to come to terms with her "terminal uniqueness," which a lot of addicts suffer. Wurtzel really *is* special, talented, and respected worldwide, but when it comes to her addiction, she's no different from anyone else. She also learns that there are no reasons why an addict uses, that addicts use because they are addicts, and any reason for using can be invented. She plays games, comparing heroin and cocaine and deciding her cocaine addiction is "better" because it is of the mind, not of the body like heroin. She comforts herself because you can't OD on Ritalin and cocaine like you can on other drugs.
After Prozac Nation and over the years, many readers have commented that Wurtzel is a whiny narrator. She is indeed. Depressed people are whiny and inherently unlikable, and it comes across in the narrative. Depressed drug-addicted people? Even more self-absorbed and irritating to be around. The strength of Wurtzel's book(s) is that she places the reader directly in that whiny, self-absorbed place. She lets us in to her insane mind games justifying her addition. Anyone recovering from addiction or dealing with an addict will see recognizable elements here.
My recommended reading order for newbies to Elizabeth Wurtzel is (1) Prozac Nation (ground-breaking work with a personal portrait of depression before the days of safe anti-depressants), (2) More, Now, Again (watch that person from Prozac Nation fall again and again into drug addiction), and (3) Bitch (read the book she wrote when she was high on Ritalin and cocaine, the book the obsessively re-edited in drug-addicted isolation).
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