For the past six months, I have been trying to hold a conversation with Elizabeth Wurtzel. Each week, I have phoned both her land line and mobile, leaving messages intended to flatter her into returning my calls, but I have managed only one brief exchange: a stilted, slightly surreal chat which focused on her mother's dog (whose yapping rather drowned her out) and which ended with the setting of an appointment for an interview that never happened.
I've also received two e-mails, thanks to which I can report that first, Wurtzel has decided belatedly to go to law school, to do her bit to ensure the legal profession is not dominated by conservative men, and second, she does a quite convincing impression of contrition -- "I'm so sorry; I feel dreadful about this."
My quest to speak to the 36-year-old American was based on the 10th anniversary of Prozac Nation, the memoir of depression whose shadow still eclipses Wurtzel's subsequent books, the babbly, post-feminist polemic Bitch, and More, Now, Again, a grimly solipsistic account of being addicted to snorting the childhood hyperactivity drug Ritalin (in Florida, naturally enough).
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE MANUFACTURER
The latter two are still on the shelves, soon to be joined by a slim self-help manual entitled Radical Sanity, but it is Prozac that has been favourably compared to Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and translated into 20 languages. A call to a friend who works for a national book chain confirms its continuing sale: in its shops alone, the book manages a weekly average of 20 copies, no mean feat for a work first published a decade ago.
It has also been made into a film, though in keeping with its author's reputation for recurrently stumbling into mishap, the movie, in which Christina Ricci plays Wurtzel, looks ever-more likely to remain unseen. Given the success of its source material, along with the jaw-dropping quality of Ricci's performance, the locking-away of this one is puzzling indeed.
This may have more to do with film-business politics than Wurtzel herself, though one of her more notorious statements has played its part. In February 2002, while promoting More, Now, Again via an interview with the Toronto Globe and Mail, she was asked about the events of Sept. 11, 2001, in the context of her residence close to the World Trade Center. Her reply ran: "I had not the slightest emotional reaction. I thought, this is a really strange art project ... it was a most amazing sight in terms of sheer elegance. It fell like water. It just slid, like a turtleneck going over someone's head." She concluded, "I just felt like everyone was overreacting. People were going on about it. That part really annoyed me."
The upshot was a predictable savaging in the New York Post and the first postponement of the film's release by Miramax. "In dealing with any of our films that had a 9/11-related concern, we have chosen to err on the side of sensitivity and allowed more time to pass," said a company spokesman.
Since then, noises have occasionally been made about a possible release -- in spring of this year, for example -- only for the wires to once again go quiet. Among those involved with the film, all this has led to an evident tetchiness. An e-mail to one of the key players, tentatively asking if I might be allowed to see it, brought forth the following reply: "Just leame [sic] alone, ass hole."
I was 25 when I first read Prozac Nation. I was impressed not only by Wurtzel's strident prose, but by her placing of our generation's woes in the context of both the aftershocks of the 1960s, and the fact that we had bumbled through our teenage years in the hard-bitten Reagan-Thatcher era. The upshot, she seemed to argue, had been our own kind of arrested development.
"At age 26," went one of the most striking sentences in the book's epilogue, "I feel like I am finally going through adolescence." For someone enjoying an extended student lifestyle, the words were comforting.
At 10 years' distance, Prozac Nation remains -- and this is not intended as criticism -- a strikingly adolescent read. It contains absurdly showy lines such as "Maybe what I really need is some Thoreau." Moreover, it is stuffed with aphorisms founded on the kind of dogmatic certainty that adulthood perhaps erodes: "There are two kind of dysfunctional families: those who don't talk enough, and those who talk too much;" "If you feel everything intensely, ultimately you feel nothing at all;" "Insanity is knowing that what you're doing is completely idiotic, but somehow you just can't stop it."
The endless comparisons to The Bell Jar are, it has to be said, rather misplaced. Whereas Plath wrote with a kind of dispassionate economy, beautifully reflecting the numbness that came with her condition, Wurtzel's voice is brattish and splenetic, capturing the almost sociopathic side of depression that underpins the book's more unpalatable moments. (When she attempts suicide, her therapist tells her she has never lost a patient and is not about to start. "I hope you're not doing this for the sake of your statistics," Wurtzel shoots back.) In keeping with all that, She takes her self-loathing into places that the decorum of Plath's era would surely have ruled out: "My mouth was getting tired and chapped from giving so many blowjobs" is not a very 1963 kind of thought.
For all that, Prozac Nation has rather dated. It now reads like a document of that all-too-brief era that stretched between the end of the Cold War and the toppling of the aforementioned twin towers, when history momentarily seemed suspended, and Anglo-American popular culture took on an inescapable sense of pained introspection. Wurtzel nailed the spirit of the age thus: "Perhaps the next time half-a-million people gather for a protest march on the White House green, it will not be for abortion rights or gay liberation, but because we're all so bummed out."
The advent of the Bush age surely makes such sentiments look downright decadent, but if the book's awkward fit with recent history might explain the non-appearance of the film, those whose labors have so far been in vain aren't letting on. According to its producer, Paul Miller, Ricci did a "stunning, stunning job," and the movie's potential success is self-evident. "There's a phenomenal audience out there who'll go and see this, purely because of the book," he says. "And then you've got the statistics on people who are depressed or have taken anti-depressant drugs -- that's something like one in 10 people in the US ... that's a huge audience."
Yet Miller is still waiting for the conclusion of the movie's labyrinthine saga. Back in 1999, he and Norwegian director Erik Skjoldbjaerg, responsible for the original version of Insomnia , took on a script whose first draft had attracted the attention of Christina Ricci. According to Larry Gross, the first screenwriter they employed, Ricci's participation (as both an actor and co-producer) was contingent upon the screenplay being rewritten from scratch, a task duly accomplished in just three weeks, before Gross was replaced by the Irish writer Frank Deasy. The result collapsed the book's decade-long span into Wurtzel's first year at Harvard and built the plot around her relationship with three key individuals: her mother (played by Jessica Lange), her therapist (Anne Heche), and her boyfriend, Rafe (Jason Biggs).
Completed without the aid of a big movie company, the film was duly screened at the Toronto Film Festival. "If there were any doubts that Ricci is one of the most interesting, resourceful and hugely watchable young actresses of her generation, then Prozac Nation ends them," said the Hollywood Reporter.
"Her performance ... compels your attention every moment she is on screen." The New York Times, by contrast, complained that "the movie seems to be about a pouty-lipped solipsist -- not so much a sufferer of depression as a carrier."
Miramax, for better or worse, sent in its acquisitions people and quickly forged a distribution deal. Thus began 18 purgatorial months of test screenings and re-edits, punctuated by the minor media cyclone around Wurtzel's 9/11 comments, and a limited release for the film in its director's native Norway.
"I went to every test screening, eight of them and at the last one, I thought we had a great movie on our hands," says Paul Miller. "There were plans to release it, but the dates kept getting pushed back. But Christina was on the covers of Premiere magazine and Psychology Today, they brought out a tie-in paperback that sold 150,000 and then ... no movie."
"It's a truthful depiction of depression," says Frank Deasy. "And I think the reason Miramax has struggled is the fact that it doesn't have a traditional dramatic structure, in terms of a clear, unqualified ending. Look at the book: Elizabeth is very clear that Prozac has helped her, but you're left with a dilemma, because perhaps she no longer knows who she is. We didn't want to come down heavily on one side or the other. People have experienced depression like that aspect of the film, but a lot of people don't like it. Miramax certainly don't seem to like it."
Larry Gross, meanwhile, has a fascinating explanation of the endless hold-ups. The 9/11 comment, he says, is of only trifling importance; far more crucial is a recipe for paralysis based on the book's reputation, Wurtzel's pre-eminence in certain New York circles, and Miramax chief Harvey Weinstein's keen awareness of the possibility of failure.
"Harvey might buy an obscure Japanese film and release it, knowing there's a chance it won't work, because no one will pay it the kind of attention that will rebound against him," says Gross. "Prozac Nation is in the backyard of the people who look at what he does for a living. So any failure to put it over will be looked at very carefully. And that's a reason not to distribute it.
"What you have to realise about New York," he continues, "is that people there think Woody Allen's movies are popular, because they all talk about them. With Wurtzel, it's, `We talk about her stuff all the time, therefore it must be huge.' So if Harvey didn't deliver a commercially successful film on a nationwide level, they'd be like, `How did you drop this ball?"
Given the praise for her performance, Ricci must be very frustrated, though, presumably on account of the clout wielded by Miramax, her few pronouncements about Prozac Nation's non-appearance have been couched in terms of a minor inconvenience. "It's upsetting," she said last year. "In some ways, you have to learn not to have an audience validate your work. But in some ways, you can't help it."
Wurtzel, predictably enough, isn't nearly as polite. "As you should have figured out by now, it's a horrible movie," she told the New York Times. "If they thought it was good, they'd have released it long ago." She went on, "But if it comes out and everyone thinks it's amazing, I'll say that it was amazing."
Her feelings are underlined by the fact that when Wurtzel first saw the film, she reportedly wept. After all those futile weeks spent chasing a woman who once described herself as "a pain in the ass but also fun," I know the feeling.
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