Customer Reviews

More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction

5 star:		(29)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(22)

 

 

Henry Miller wrote, "No one - not even God - knows what a man suffers on the inside." So I'll give Elizabeth Wurtzel, the human being, the benefit of the doubt and assume that her pain (whose nature is never made quite clear, but seems to have something to do with her mother not understanding her) is as authentic and deserving of our human sympathy as that of Diana Spencer (whose death Wurtzel mourns, "just because she was so pretty"), the World Trade Center victims (to whom Wurtzel is apparently indifferent, but who probably weren't that good looking on average), or, for that matter, you or me.

On the other hand, Elizabeth Wurtzel, the narrator of this book, had better hope that God loves her because it's not likely that too many other people will. (Her editor, who lets Wurtzel hole up in the publisher's offices during her terminal coke binge to insure the completion of her second book, doesn't count.) To describe her as "narcissistic" would be hopelessly inadequate. Enraptured self-involvement on this scale approaches the sociopathic. It would be one thing if the self being celebrated were a writer as insightful and masterly as, say, Colette. But when the best you can muster is urban-zingy wisecracks, not infrequently plagiarized from rock lyrics (note to Wurtzel: if you're going to rip off a Paul Westerberg lyric - i.e. "waitress in the sky" - it's not very smart to epigraph your chapter with another Paul Westerberg lyric), the result is pretty pathetic.

"More, Now, Again" does represent an artistic advance for the authoress, inasmuch as her photograph appears on the back cover rather than the front, and that she doesn't appear nude in it. (It is a large color photograph that takes up the entire back of the dust jacket, and she does pout rather come-hitherly in it, but still.) But how well can you identify with an addiction narrative when hitting bottom consists of - I swear I'm not joking - sleeping through an opportunity to do a photo shoot for Coach bags?

With More, Now, Again, Elizabeth Wurtzel surpasses her premiere best seller, Prozac Nation. Wurtzel, still battling depression, initally receives a small dose of Ritalin to improve her concentration and mood. And it works, at first. The problem starts when Lizzie likes the Ritalin a little too much and plunges headlong into the smarmy world of addiction with all of its repulsive correlates. The addict's desperation along with her brilliant manipulations lucidly, with tongue fully in cheek, depicted here.
Wurtzel does not glamorize addiction -- to the contrary, she almost excoriates herself upon the alter of versilimitude. Although some readers may find the graphic nature of addiction too foreign or too incomprehensible, other readers will be thankful for her courage in writing about her struggles so candidly. Ultimately, Wurtzel redeems herself by slyly poking fun at herself and winking at the astute reader.
Amazingly, Lizzie, even while tweaking, (or later, sober, recalling)is able to access with surgical precision the desperation, compulsiveness and the damage done. Her (often) entirely self-serving motives and concurrent self-mockery are comical, a needed respite in a book of this nature. Similarly, the meta-conversations between Lizzie, another person, along with Lizzies unspoken *real* thoughts lend humanity and humor to the character's struggles and the author pulls them off brilliantly.
Elizabeth Wurtzel is extraordinarily talented, and More, Now, Again is her finest work (IMHO).... Thing is, Lizzie, you've left me (high and dry) and *jonesing* for your next tome. So please, get writing, Now! I want More! And so do it Again! (wheels turning round and round, he goes black jack, do it again --Steely Dan)

This woman would be pitiful if she were not so apallingly arrogant. She is genuinely sick; however, one cannot feel sorry for her in the face of her meanspirited remarks. She has had every advantage, yet she obviously learned nothing at Harvard. She boasts that she is the leading non-fiction writer of her generation and that she is the 'prettiest girl she knows." This is good because no one else thinks so. She may have a ph.d. in the reader's digest or in junk food, but she certainly is not worldly, knowledgeable or scholarly. I haven't read one good review of any of her books. How in heaven's name could this sloppy work have been published? The publishers were evidently high as well. I feel sorry for the poor trees that sacrificed their lives for the paper.

Reading an Elizabeth Wurtzel book is like watching a slow-motion train moving towards a stalled car: you don't really want to look because of the impending crash, but you look anyhow. Her latest book, "More Now Again" is a peculiar look inside the mind of a repeat addict, which has some definite bumpy spots sprinkled with insight.

It begins as Wurtzel is seemingly clean of her drug addictions, until she is prescribed Ritalin for an attention-span problem. However, she soon began crushing the pills and snorting them, as she once did cocaine, because she missed sniffing things. Soon cocaine and stolen pills are back in her life, as she ends up stuck in obsessive behavior patterns, engages in inept shoplifting, and spins back into the world of addiction.

Wurtzel is alternately annoying and sympathetic; she frankly admits to handicapping marriages whenever she can, and to stealing when big-store clerks don't serve her fast enough, though she claims to scrupulously not steal from small stores. At the same time, there is something pitifully sympathetic about her spiral into addiction and the humiliating arrest when she was unable to stop sobbing. It's difficult to explain exactly what qualities in Wurtzel are either annoying or endearing, because of the blatant honesty with which she presents unsympathetic facets of herself such as, for example, her rantings about how she feels for Timothy McVeigh. There are passages where readers will sympathize with Wurtzel's long-suffering mother, who wants her to be "normal."

However, her descriptions of both drug addiction and the psychological state that drags certain people back to it is both harrowing and revealing. We see Wurtzel obsessively underlining interesting passages in a book and tweezing her legs to the bone, but walking around with filthy hair and a shirt stained with spilled coffee and tea. However, she does not go to the other extreme, which too often ends up glamorizing addiction; rather, she tells the reader plainly and calmly what she does, without overemphasizing it. Only occasionally does her prose lapse into a sense of true panic and/or despair. In one particularly affecting passage, she describes the mindset of a repeat addict: "It's the stuff people can handle that makes addicts get high. We get high over nothing."

Perhaps the best look at Wurtzel is the picture on the back cover. Though at first glance she seems like a conventionally pretty blonde with artfully-arranged hair, makeup and clothing, her large, heavily dark-rimmed, staring eyes add an air of bizarre sadness to her face.

Her writing style has an addled air most of the time, as if she were still on drugs as she wrote it. The frequent lapses into self-examination are sometimes interesting but sometimes merely seem self-indulgent. However, they never lack in response quality: whether it is an angry bristling or nods of sudden understanding, the readers WILL react with one emotion or another.

Love her or loathe her, Elizabeth Wurtzel provides a bizarre, sometimes disgusting look at addiction in this follow-up to "Prozac Nation." Her fans will enjoy it, her detractors will be revolted by it, and newcomers may not be sure what to think.

Wurtzel spins a tale that brings several harrowing years of her life vividly into the mind of the reader. Creative, bright, driven, and always close to the edge, speed addiction completely takes over her life for a couple years, eclipsing people and food and most events like going outside. I loved a number of insights and turns of phrase I hope I'll remember for years. (Complaining that she can't go to Betty Ford because she dislikes the name of one nurse, she adds, "I'll never make it in rehab with this attitude. On the other hand, without this attitude [and her life in shreds], I wouldn't need to be in rehab." Her style is at its best in describing her darkest addiction experiences almost as if we're reading a diary - quite a trick, particularly when she bumps up against real people and things in her strung-out state and they insert into the narrative like gawky Martians. How it seems clever and rational for a bright Harvard girl to be living in a Florida strip motel as a hollow-eyed, anorexic shell and going to six different emergency rooms for the same problem in three weeks; how to explain while thrown in jail for shoplifting that you need to snort speed or your head will explode, and you'll call the ACLU. The story takes her on through several cycles between rehab's and twelve-step programs and relapses, but the ultimate recovery story was as moving and convincing as any. "Less than Zero" meets Ann Sexton meets Eric Bogosian meets Leaving Las Vegas....

Stoned or sober, Wurtzel herself can be so selfish, so nasty and so pampered -- she checks into $450-a-night hotel rooms on a whim, gives drug dealers her publisher's FedEx account number and leans on friends so heavily that they wind up more haggard than Wurtzel herself -- that even readers who've gone through a similar hell may find it difficult to relate Wurtzel's experiences to their own. Were her publishers also stoned?

Something has gone terribly wrong with this book. The problem goes back to one of the most basic questions you encounter in writing classes: How do you create a "boring" character without being a terrific bore yourself? She succeeds admirably; she succeeds too well. Elizabeth Wurtzel has set out to create a selfish, shallow, repetitive, exasperatingly stupid, hideously self-centered, morbidly narcissistic, excruciatingly dull, pre-recovery persona.

I honestly had no idea that this sort of material could actually get published. Reading the first 329 pages of this book is like nothing so much as listening to a girlfriend from Hell yammering on endlessly about every aspect of her pitiful life. It's a form of rampant egotism, the belief that even your shopping lists will be of interest to people.

Like all narcissists, she suffers from a basic lack of empathy. ''I've never been much interested in terrorism. It seems like someone else's problem,'' she says of the Oklahoma bombing trial. ''The victims of Timothy McVeigh start to really irritate me,"

Wurtzel cannot write and certainly never touched the depths of addiction, and found little worth recording in the shallows. A better title would have been Me, Myself, I.

Well, this book is, you know, like, okay I mean it's really. Oh, what do I mean? Okay, it's like about her, you know, addiction and everything. And like, she was addicted to this drug that's supposed to be used for, you know, people who have ADD. But then she, I mean, she didn't mean to, but she, like, became addicted to it. And, I mean, she, you know, had some big problems and everything. I mean, things, you know. IN OTHER WORDS: More, Now, Again: A memoir of addiction is so terrible on so many levels for so many reasons. This is an utterly vapid collection of words, assembled together as "a memoir" of the authors battle with one drug that lead to another, etc. Instead of offering any new insight into this crowded genre, this book merely rambles along, out of steam before it even begins. I honestly can't believe it was published. Surely her agent (or someone) must have told her, Do you really think this is a good idea? Because this book is so empty, so pointless, that it leaves one feeling breathless. The author's first two books sold well, so we have this, a third for the sake of a third. And even if you love the author's previous works, this one will leave you feeling flat. More, Now, Again is not more of the same...it's less of the same. And, you know, she could, I mean, maybe some day, you know, try to write, instead, of, you know, blabbering with her fingers.

This book captivated me from the first page. From Ritalin to cocaine, she keeps trying to find happiness in substance and finds it takes over her life. VERY true-to-life, very realistic thoughts in an addict's head about how drugs feel and the power they can gain over you. People have called her self-absorbed, but I find this to be the opposite-she's writing about what happened to her so that others can maybe gain perspective in their lives. Who else can she write about with such knowledge? I don't understand readers' criticisms of autobiographical non-fiction with that argument. I didn't really relate to Prozac Nation but have found that all of my friends and I, we all found parts of ourselves in More, Now, Again. If you've ever had a drug problem, READ THIS BOOK! It will show you how messed up you can get over time. I seriously recommend this book-I borrowed it from a friend and bought myself a copy after I returned theirs to them.

First,I'm glad I didn't believe the other reviews and ordered this book anyway. Wurtzel is honest and tells it like it is. I enjoyed this book because it was real-Wurtzel shared many events and feelings that most people would keep to themselves. I felt sad when the book ended because I wanted to read what happened next. Hopefully, Wurtzel will have another book to continue her story.

If, after reading Prozac Nation, you found yourself wondering 'And then what happened?', this book is for you. The chapters that deal with the author's extended stay in Florida are the best. (The best part of the book, that is, not the best as in 'great'.) After that, the story gets progressively sketchier, as if Wurtzel is growing increasingly uncomfortable with sharing what happened to her and finally decides to speed things up (no pun intended) and make a long story short, which is understandable, I suppose, given what she went through, but disappointing nevertheless, since she is obviously capable of much better writing than what the second half of the book contains.
All in all, I quite liked the book (not as much as I had thought I would, but still), but at times, I found myself wishing Wurtzel would stop harping on what a small appetite she has - it got really annoying after a while. For someone who, according to herself, has "no interest in food", she sure mentions it a lot. (Or, as one writer once quipped about Prozac Nation: "My favorite thing about Elizabeth is that no matter how dramatically ill she gets, she never forgets to mention how thin she is.")
My least favorite part of the book was not the book itself, but the book description, which is badly written - the last part of it reads like something concocted by the people at Hallmark and would probably produce insulin shock in any diabetics who happened to read it - and makes the book appear more profusely emotional than it really is. So don't be put off by the at times unbearably maudlin book description ("As honest as a confession and as heartfelt as a prayer" . . . Give me a break.) - the book itself is actually not that bad.