In her new memoir, More, Now, Again, author Elizabeth Wurtzel has abandoned the pose of misunderstood intellectual feminist that she struck in her last offering, Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women, and returns to the format that made her famous in the first place: the memoir of the truly fucked up. Her first memoir, Prozac Nation, published when Wurtzel was just 26, drew readers into the life of a depressed, over-privileged Harvard student who really needed a good antidepressant. In her new memoir, Wurtzel draws the same readers into the world of a Ritalin-cocaine-whatever-else addict who really needs a good rehab. Wurtzel is no heroin-addled Jim Carroll, reduced to living on the streets and turning tricks for a fix. She's a nice, middle-class kind of addict who receives cocaine via Federal Express while she's holed up in her mother's beachfront Florida condo. Her Manhattan shrink legitimately prescribes the Ritalin she crushes and snorts by the handful. Watching Wurtzel spin out of control is like watching a train crash in progress, except instead of the spectacular sound of grinding metal and the horror of mangled bodies, there's an annoying screech and a bunch of pissed-off passengers who are going to be late for work. What makes Wurtzel someone you can identify with rather than someone you just want to slap is that she's perfectly aware that she's been given more advantages in life than most. She also knows that humans are a messy and needy species and even a Harvard education and critical acclaim can't change that. "This is how heroin — how all drugs — makes me feel:" Wurtzel writes, "Quite simply, it makes me feel OK to be me. Here is how I feel not on drugs: I hate me." As a writer Wurtzel has been compared to Hunter S. Thompson, but both her drug use and her prose lack Thompson's edge. And while Wurtzel does put herself out there for the world to examine and judge, she also lacks Thompson's honesty. For most of the memoir, Wurtzel tries to come to terms with the fact that her addiction is just like anyone else's; she's not special. She claims to finally embrace that fact but in the end the reader knows she still doesn't get it. She's Ally McBeal, believing that her problems are special just because they're hers. It's almost a given that Wurtzel is fucking up more — a guarantee of future tomes about her messy, needy self.
I can hardly wait.
—Rochelle Renford
This article appears in Feb 6-12, 2002.