Many laughed at Wurtzel and her latter contemporaries for their candour and their self-obsession, finding there to be something essentially unseemly, un-literary about their work – and, I would venture, something inherently, stickily feminine. Once, and not very long ago, such warnings were born of censoriousness, not kindness. It has become a bit of a trope among established writers to warn younger ones off this kind of work, largely for good reason. Editors began to stress that they did not want to hear personal pitches. The culture changed, helped not only by Wurtzel and her contemporaries but by the incontinent nature of online writing: in the 26 years since the publication of Prozac Nation, female “confessional” writing has gone from a non-genre, to utterly pervasive, to played out and haggard. Wurtzel’s enormous success helped to popularise a particular raw, candid memoir style that in turn would influence the boom in online personal essays – what Slate magazine once termed “ the first person industrial complex”, hordes of mostly women writers getting their early breaks by writing intimate pieces. For many people Prozac Nation, her debut about depression, was an exhilarating break from literary convention, an entirely new and liberating way to write and conceive of oneself as a writer. Of course, the begrudgery and the ambivalence – as well as all the criticism Wurtzel received – is only one side of the story.

Elizabeth wurtzel prozac nation author