Not an owner's manual (Prozac Nation - Elizabeth Wurtzel)

Member Name: number63

Product:	Prozac Nation - Elizabeth Wurtzel
Date:	12/12/00 (244 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Does communicate the pain of manic depression

Disadvantages: Does very little else

There’s something about depression, or manic-depressive illness, that immediately seems to make people think of good art or literature. There’s always been a stereotype that those who suffer from mental illness are also possessed of creative faculties beyond those of the fortunate unafflicted. Indeed, one of the leading experts on the manic depression, Kay Redfield Jamison, has written a lengthy book on the subject. Whatever the truth of this cliche, it is common to read or hear someone praising the work of suffering author because it ‘describes exactly how it feels’. The two main authors who come two mind are, of course, Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Wurtzel.

But communicating emotion is only half the job of a good book. It is, in fact, remarkably easy to get your emotions across on paper, especially if your reader is seeking to make some kind of identification with you or your work. But there are two dangers that come out of work by an author suffering from depression. The first is that critical opinion on your work is quite likely to take the form of ‘here is a work by a mentally ill writer’. I’m always reminded of a scene in the film “My Left Foot” where a gallery owner stands up and says “Some people consider Christy Brown a great crippled painter. I don’t. I just consider him a great painter.” It is wrong to subject a writer to the limitations of his or her mental illness, no less than it is to consider a writer great because she’s a woman, or black, or gay. These are structures of limitation which can obscure proper appreciation of the works themselves. I certainly feel this way about Plath: her early works, “The Bell Jar” included, are works of strong emotion and capable writing, but there only maybe six of her poems that are truly great. Sadly, these are never the ones to be anthologised, because ‘Lady Lazarus’ and ‘Daddy’ are seen to hav
e greater emotional impact.

The second danger of equating a writer too much with his/her disability is that sometimes a work is praised that simply does not deserve it. This, I feel, is certainly the case with “Prozac Nation”. Regardless of how good Wurtzel is at communicating the suffering of manic-depressive illness (and I will admit, she is), this does not make for a good book. There is too much else going on in this book, and it can be no surprise that when people actually criticise it, they do so by concentrating on the author’s character. This is a work of acute self-indulgence, so much so that you often get the feeling that Wurtzel is revelling in her illness, milking it for every last drop of pain and suffering, so that she can put it down on paper. A heroic effort, you might say, but I would disagree. The effect of a good book is to establish a dialogue with its reader, and ‘Prozac Nation’ fails to do this. What we get is a narrator screaming “Look how much I suffer!”, and a reader who, if he/she is anything like me, can only look on and say, “And what do you expect me to do about it?”

Maybe a book about manic-depressive illness should do more than strike an emotional chord with other sufferers. Maybe it should try to communicate with those who haven’t ever been depressed, who can only stand by in confusion when they see someone in pain, who are absolutley impotent to do anything for the person and can often blame themselves for this, or who don’t understand that it’s not just a matter of pulling yourself together. “Prozac Nation” does none of these things. In fact, it works for me in the opposite direction. This book does the illness, and those of us who suffer from it, absolutely no favours. If anyone should ask me to recommend a book on the subject, this would certainly not be it. Try instead Kay Redfield Jamison’s autobiographical work “An
Unquiet Mind”, which describes plainly and simply the efforts she, and, importantly, her family and friends, have made to accommodate the illness into their daily lives. Because it doesn’t go away, and screaming about how much it hurts does nobody any good.

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