I was 18, and a sophomore in college, when Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America was published. Without Prozac Nation as a model before them, so many writers – me among them – might not have gone on to write memoirs about periods of difficulty. This was the thing about Prozac Nation: it didn’t just popularize a new genre of memoir. But perhaps what’s most striking about rereading Prozac Nation today is that the book is not nearly as “cynical” or “disaffected” in that characteristic Gen X way as I had remembered it. Wurtzel knew that a voice on the page could be like a voice in your ear, and all the more powerful for that.

Source: The Guardian January 09, 2020 17:18 UTC