Pubdate: Sun, 24 Feb 2002
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2002 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Alex Abramovich

'MORE, NOW, AGAIN': STRAIGHT TO REHAB

In 1994, Elizabeth Wurtzel's ''Prozac Nation'' -- a grating, gripping 
memoir of her depression -- helped inaugurate the genre of 
20-something autobiography and turned Wurtzel into a spokeswoman for 
attractively anhedonic young women. But Wurtzel squandered that cache 
with her follow-up, ''Bitch,'' a book intended to be a trenchant 
''treatise on the nature of desperate sexual manipulation.'' It drew 
attention mostly for its cover photo of Wurtzel, nude, with an 
airbrushed nipple and a soft-focus middle finger extended toward the 
reader.

Detractors of ''Bitch'' can be forgiven for barely bothering to read 
the book -- it turns out that Wurtzel barely bothered to write it. 
Her new memoir, ''More, Now, Again,'' describes the circumstances 
surrounding the genesis of ''Bitch'': how Wurtzel sharpened her 
concentration by snorting upwards of 40 crushed Ritalin tablets a 
day, overcame writer's block with endless eightballs of cocaine, 
dumped the resulting mess in her long-suffering editor's lap, checked 
herself into rehab, then cleaned up her act, more or less. It's a 
testament to the editor of ''Bitch'' that for all its flaws, it 
didn't read like the gush you'd expect from a Ritalin addict and 
cokehead. Oddly, ''More, Now, Again'' does.

Since the course of drug addiction gives most addiction memoirs a 
certain relentless similarity (you fall from humanity, you claw your 
way back, and in the interim you look a lot more like other addicts 
than like yourself), what sets the best of them apart is their prose. 
But Wurtzel, who tells us midway through this book that she just 
might be the best nonfiction writer of her generation, either writes 
badly on purpose or subscribes to the ''oh well, whatever'' school of 
sentence construction. ''I don't actually roll my eyeballs, but I do 
metaphorically'' is one line you'll find here.

Like all addicts, Wurtzel does some bad things -- shoplifting, 
sleeping with married men, appearing on ''The O'Reilly Factor'' -- 
while stoned out of her mind, or sleepless from the same. Like all 
narcissists, she suffers from a basic lack of empathy. ''I've never 
been much interested in terrorism. It seems like someone else's 
problem,'' she says of the Oklahoma bombing trial. ''The victims of 
Timothy McVeigh start to really irritate me, and not for no reason. 
Their bid for significance, their demands for closure, their need to 
describe the goodness and innocence of the dead, their insistence on 
filling air time with their compulsion for attention -- they don't 
seem to understand that they are irrelevant.'' The book is so full of 
strange, scattershot riffs like that one, written with such misplaced 
glee, that there's no sense of distance between Wurtzel the writer 
and Wurtzel the addict. No matter the subject, she clings to a mode 
of self-congratulatory transgressiveness.

Relevance is in the eye of the beholder, but stoned or sober, Wurtzel 
herself can be so selfish, so nasty and so pampered -- she checks 
into $450-a-night hotel rooms on a whim, gives drug dealers her 
publisher's FedEx account number and leans on friends so heavily that 
they wind up more haggard than Wurtzel herself -- that even readers 
who've gone through a similar hell may find it difficult to relate 
Wurtzel's experiences to their own.

And since the worst thing that seems to have happened to Wurtzel as a 
result of her addictions is that she alienated her publishing house 
and jumped to a new one, what is there to relate to? The most 
profound loss Wurtzel describes involves someone else -- her drug 
buddy, the novelist Robert Bingham, who died in 1999. There's nothing 
to prevent Wurtzel from presenting herself as proxy for Bingham's 
inner demons, of course, but like much of her book, it's an 
unpleasant, exploitative alignment. ''Rob and I are both desperate,'' 
Wurtzel writes. ''Everyone else around him is just decadent.'' But 
the truth is that while Bingham may have been no more or less 
desperate than the rest of us, he did apparently overdose on heroin 
and isn't here to speak for himself. His silence is eloquent. For all 
her sound and fury, you can't help thinking that Wurtzel never 
touched the depths of addiction, and found little worth recording in 
the shallows.

Alex Abramovich is a writer in New York.
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