This well-written memoir chronicles the teenage and college years of Wurtzel’s life, which she spends primarily in a funk of deep, unshakeable depression. If you have not felt this kind of depression (and I haven’t), it is easy to become impatient with the author midway through the book. She seems to have everything that a lot of us want: a burgeoning career as a feature writer for newspapers and major magazines like Rolling Stone (and this is while she is still in college); a scholarship-funded education at Harvard; an endless supply of endlessly patient friends. Even her tragedies are minor: a distant father, a failed short-term relationship. So why is she constantly whining and self-obsessed and so full of pain? Wurtzel herself even comes out of her funk from time to time to wonder, “Why am I so depressed? What do I have to feel bad about?”

It is this impatience with the narrator that is the real brilliance of this book, and as we find out in the last chapter, Wurtzel has deliberately portrayed herself exactly as she felt, both to depict how it feels to be severely depressed and to let us readers know how it feels to know the severely depressed. And we do, believe me.

By the end of the book, we have been through the wringer with Wurtzel, and we are glad to see her find salvation in drugs (although she is careful to explain that while anti-depressants have saved lives, they are in danger of becoming over-prescribed for the most minor cases of the blues). So yes, this book is uncomfortable to read, and we may occasionally want to yell at Wurtzel to snap out of it already, but when it is done, we know just what hell she went through – because we went through it with her.

I could have written this, if I had the nerve and the talent. Wurtzel rocks. She writes accurately and with candor, proving that she’s been there, done that.

They ask me if I’ve done any drugs in the last twenty-four hours, and I say no. Then I say, I guess I smoked some pot and snorted some coke also, but that was just to make the Ecstasy last longer. I also admit to them that I had some beer, maybe a couple of sea breezes somewhere in there, too. And the nthe doctor asks if I have a substance abuse problem, and all I can do is laugh. I laugh really hard and really loud, a howling hyena laught because what I’m thinking is how nice it would be if my problem were drugs, if my problem weren’t my whole damn life and how little relief from it the drugs provide. (120)

This is a slow-motion-trainwreck of a book, sometimes entertaining, often disturbing, always thought-provoking. It’s a memoir of sorts; the story of Elizabeth’s Wurtzel’s account of her battle with depression. It’s a tale of her pain, but also a love story because, by the end, Elizabeth seems to be in love with her own torment.

She first noticed her dramtic mood swings shortly after puberty and she was transformed from a smart, happy little girl into a dangerously moody, angry teenager. Her problems were aggravated by the ongoing war between her divorced parents. I guess no one expects a teenager to be bright and happy, because her parents really didn’t take note – they merely wrote off her moods to teen angst. Year and year, her mental state became worse until, by the time she was in university, she had sunk into a deep depression, accompanied by heavy drug use, disasterous relationships and even suicide attempts.

After years of therapy and muted cries for help, she finally find the right therapist and was placed on a therapy of Prozac and Lithium, among other drugs.

For me, this was the most interesting part of the book – seeing the difference between Elizabeth-depressed and Elizabeth-on-Prozac (the difference was stark). Also interesting was the author’s examination of her own depression, how it developed and morphed into something that became her identity. Much like an alchoholic who has no sense of self without the bottle, Elizabeth had no sense of self without pain.

This is a hard book to get through at times, and I found the author’s voice a bit too whiny and self-absorbed. ‘This is the nature of depression,’ we’re told, but it smacked of drama and I didn’t enjoy the book as much as I wanted to.

I really liked this book. I loved the sarcasm and wit of it all, the darkness, and the honestly. I’m glad I went ahead and bought the book instead of getting it from the library.

Has anyone else come across the problem of a book with the wrong numbers?? My book goes from 52-106, completely skipping 50 pages. Then when it gets to page 116, it goes back to page 106.. I’m still missing 50 pages of my book.