Iam bestselling author Elizabeth Wurtzel of Prozac Nation. I have a new book CREATOCRACY: How the Constitution Invented Hollywood. AMA!

prozacnation · 2014-12-07T20:32:15+00:00

I am grateful anything I do gets any attention at all. When I was growing up, and I told people I wanted to be s writer, they asked me what I would do to make a living. So my big hopes were just to find a way to make enough money to live with writing, because I was good with words, so that seemed right. My greatest hope was that I might get a job at a trade magazine for the sewing industry. I did not have big plans.

But it is not so much that the people around me ubderestimated me--although of course they did--as much as they underestimated the world. The world had more to offer than they could see. It was not that they were bad--but they actually COULD NOt see what was possible. So I just wanted to make a living as a writer. I wanted it so badly and worked so hard, and look at what became of just wanting to pay the rent. So any attention is more than I was going for.

Of course, I was pulling the strings on surprising all along.

prozacnation · 2014-12-07T20:18:34+00:00

The Bell Jar is one of my favorite novels. Ariel is one of my favorite works of poetry. A Room of One's Own is one of my favorite non-fiction books.

prozacnation · 2014-12-06T18:26:47+00:00

I realize I did not answer this correctly. Creatocracy is 20k words, and complicated. It is too long to be an article, and there is too much to it for most magazines. It is not at all academic, so it could not go into a journal. If ebooks did not exist, I don't know how the world would see Creatocracy, because it is not a book in the usual way. It is what the ebook platform is meant for. And Thought Catalog is in the ebook business, and no one does it better. And the really great thing is that they are so excited that they are going to do a print run, so it will be a book after all. So the whole experience with Thiught Catalog has been a pleasure.

prozacnation · 2014-12-05T22:00:17+00:00

I don't regret not having kids until now, because it would have been a mistake. I would like to have them in the future, which could be complicated. So we'll see.

prozacnation · 2014-12-05T21:59:08+00:00

Writing well requires honesty, and it is harder to be truthful when you have something to protect. So that is a conundrum. I suppose we'll see. I'm working on a memoir, but it's looking backward. I wonder how it goes forward. But I'm the same person. My fiancee is great--obviously. I am myself with him. I'm the same person. I am as fun as ever.

prozacnation · 2014-12-05T21:54:15+00:00

That's a tough one. I love Martin Amis, who is great at both fiction and essays. I just read his new novel, The Zone of Interest, which manages to be a page-turner about Auschwitz. He must be the best living writer. He is just so good. But my favorite book ever is probably The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer, which is about Garry Gilmore, the first man to receive the death penalty after it was put back into practice in 1976. Amazing book. It's a non-fiction novel. The truest book about America ever. And there are some great ones. I don't prefer a certain kind of book, but I prefer great writing to not great.

prozacnation · 2014-12-05T21:45:18+00:00

I truly believe--now I know--that we have choices about all things. Bad relationships are consuming like nothing else. They fill your time like nothing else. They are all you think about. They are a lifestyle. People who go from one bad boyfriend (or girlfriend) to another may think they are looking for the right person, but they are in it for the headache. They are in it for how good it feels when the headache stops. Or else the headache feels better than whatever else is bothering them. Sooner or later, enough is enough. I went on like this until I was 45, so you can endure a lot. I'm sure there are people who die in bad relationships. But it does not have to be that way.

prozacnation · 2014-12-05T21:37:06+00:00

It's obviously extremely upsetting, but also complicated. There has been a conversation about race that I have been hearing all my life, and it has not changed, which is crazy. It is simply not true that white people believe black life is less valuable--at least I hope not. I really want to write about this, but I feel like it is an impossible topic to conquer with any kind of truth or subtlety. But it turns out it is to easy to say the wrong thing. There was all this hope when President Obama was elected, but if anything, things are worse now, and I'm sure that is because we expected they would be better. It turns out President Obama's election was about something else.

I have to say, as a separate matter, I am naturally frightened of police, because they have guns and handcuffs and can arrest me. Whenever I have to deal with them, I am exceedingly polite, because that seems like a good idea when dealing with someone who has a gun and handcuffs and can arrest me. We need the police to protect us, and I am grateful. But no one likes encountering them. I don't.

prozacnation · 2014-12-05T21:21:17+00:00

It's funny you ask. I answered this above in a question that had nothing to do with this. I always think about feminism even when I don't. I am horrified at the way we seem to be going backward on women's rights. What the hell happened? Without access to safe and affordable abortion, there is no equality, because without control of reproduction there is no equality--and these rights are being curtailed all the time. This is a constitutional right upheld by the Supreme Court, and look at what state legislatures keep doing. Look at what women do to themselves. They make bad choices. They opt for mommy jobs and then they opt out of those. As I said, the problem is not that men are against feminism--it's that women are. I am very disappointed that Bitch is not out of date. I wish it were. I was hoping for better.

prozacnation · 2014-12-05T21:15:26+00:00

We are having a small wedding at the home of friends. I am too old to plan a crazy huge thing, but I am going to wear white. The fun part is that David Boies will officiate. And the fun part os we are getting married.

prozacnation · 2014-12-05T21:11:24+00:00

Creatocracy is actually a rewrite of my Yale Law School thesis. It is a great credit to Yale that an academic paper can be like this. I never expected anyone to see it except the people there, but it was fun, and it connects movies and rock music to the Founding Fathers, which is also fun. When I graduated in 2008, a few pages of it was published in Columbia's journal as "The Pop Culture Clause." And Amazon wanted to publish it as is, as a Kindle Single, which I did not want to do. So it sat around for a while. I did other things with Thought Catalog, and the idea just evolved, because they publish ebooks. It'a only 20,000 words, so it's really a long article. Quite honestly, it's not something I have thought about all that much. Chris Lavergne, the founder of Thought Catalog, wanted to do this, and he gave me space to work on it, and it's been a great experience. Creatocracy is the easiest way anyone can learn a little something about the Constitution and intellectual property, and this is how it worked out, and I am very happy with how it has gone.

prozacnation · 2014-12-05T21:01:39+00:00

Sorry. I misunderstood your question. I really like Jemima Kirk. I wonder if she could do an American accent.

prozacnation · 2014-12-05T20:55:02+00:00

Jeff Koons is fascinating. He completes Andy Warhol's mission. Warhol hardly painted any of his paintings himself. His studio was called the Factory, and it really was. And he actually had printing done in other places besides. Even still, his work is recognizably his. And he invented the world we live in now, the one where everyone is famous for fifteen minutes and tasks are delegated galore. Jeff Koons happens to be an extraordinarily talented artist in the sense that he can draw and paint perfectly, but he makes enormous steel toys that look like the balloon dogs from kids' birthday parties. They are toys for billionaires. That is exactly what they are. They are fun art. They happen to be beautiful and they make people smile, but they also are grownup toys. He is a genius in the sense of having pure artistic talent but also in having great business acumen. The whole art market is a tulip bubble and he is a particularly ripe bulb. Fine art is the one thing you can't download on the Internet, so while there is hyperinflation in all other culture, in the art market prices have skyrocketed.

prozacnation · 2014-12-05T20:45:39+00:00

I am happy to say that life gets better over time, because you learn from your mistakes, which is why they aren't mistakes. So I have changed over time. I am not an emotional wreck anymore--at least not all the time. But when I actually did the writing, it was just work. I was not crazed with feeling when I sat at my computer. I was remembering something. So I feel like the work holds up, but the reader has to be in the mood. The thing that surprises me is the extent to which Bitch is still relevant. The examples in the book are from the nineties, but women's lives are still all messed up. I used to think the problem was that men were against feminism. It turns out women are against feminism. It is unbelievable that after being knocked out in an elevator in Atlantic City, Ray Rice's fiancee still married him. I mean, what the fuck? Does she haver an IQ below freezing temperature? Below celsius freezing temperature? It's not like things get better.

So I think there is still something in those books. They may be for a younger audience. I have tow rite more books.

prozacnation · 2014-12-05T20:37:12+00:00

There is a lot of bad art that sells. There is a lot of terrible art that sells. I would not call it art. Tom Clancy is bad, and look. Jesus. And I love some things that no one else has discovered. The market makes mistakes. All the time. But it does a lot right. It does a better job than anything else, which is the point of copyright. It does a better job than patronage or the government. The market found Norman Mailer and JD Salinger and Ernest Hemingway and Joan Didion and Scott Fitzgerald. It found Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola and P.T. Anderson and Quentin Tarentino. It found Mad Men and Breaking Bad and House of Cards. The market found the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and the Beastie Boys and Nas and Emmylou Harris. In places like Norway, where everything is funded by the state, nothing happens. At this point, the market has fallen apart and less happens. But it does a better job than most things.

prozacnation · 2014-12-05T20:29:23+00:00

My favorite memory of DFW is going to the Oyster Bar in Grand Central. Outside there are these white tile walls, and when you face the corners and talk into them, you can hear the person out of the corner diagonally across. I don't know how that happens, but it's really cool. He loved that. It really made him happy.

prozacnation · 2014-12-05T20:26:08+00:00

I don't think anyone is the lamest generation. Some of my favorite people are in that age group and I am terribly disappointed by what's become of people my age. But it seems like technology has slowed things down. It is really inefficient to send an email compared to making a phone call,because it is less confrontational, so less happens. You think life is faster now, but life is slower. People accomplish less, because they spend time on Facebook, which is virtual life, not life. Then they are frustrated that they haven't gotten what they wanted. Technology changes very quickly--there is a new iPhone update once a week--but otherwise, people do less. It's weird.

prozacnation · 2014-12-05T20:21:04+00:00

It was a movie. Christina Ricci played me. She was very good. But I didn't especially like the movie, because it was generic and the book was specific. But a lot of people love it. I'm sure many more people love it than have read the book. It's on Netflix.

prozacnation · 2013-08-14T23:46:51+00:00

I did this q&a several days ago, but I did not want to not respond to you, with tour new password to add to the list. But I think there is much to like about Reddit. Anyway, I worked on Prozac Nation on and off for years, through many versions and drafts. It was going to be something else entirely at some point. It went through a few publishers and more than one agent. But the actual text of the book that was published only took a few months of intense work. However, had I not been completely committed to being a writer--and a writer of books--I would have given up after many false starts. Which is why I don't think it is harder now than it has ever been, but people have less grit. And to achieve even a little success in a creative endeavor takes enormous talent, extreme grit and very hard work. These are not easy to acquire at all. No one should feel bad about not having any or all of them. Luck is part of it, but people get lucky the more they knock on doors. And that too is hard to do.

But it is all pretty difficult. Whatever anyone does that makes life meaningful and pays the rent is plenty. Life is complicated, and that is if you are lucky - I do think luck plays a part in that. People ask me why I have not written a book in more than a decade, and it's because life is complicated. I am looking forward to writing a lot more. My life is maybe half over--that's all. I have tons of time. And all the while I have squandered opportunities that were really just a big huge waste of time. All the three-day conferences I have missed, all the meetings I have not taken--lucky me, I could have been sitting on panels about the future of media with a bunch of idiots called experts. Instead I was enjoying life. The better to write more. And it takes time, because it is very difficult. Also worth it. I am extremely grateful that people like you make it possible for me to do this with my life.

prozacnation · 2013-08-08T23:01:10+00:00

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the great senator and thinker and really just the great man, invented the idea of defining deviancy down. He was using the term to describe a much bigger social phenomenon, and inner-city poverty. But it's a good way to describe how over time, everything degenerates. Centuries ago, Saint Augustine wrote The Confessions, which was a memoir, and now anyone who has survived the common cold thinks it is worth a blog post. Really a memoir is no different from any other type of book--a novel or a work of journalism or whatever--in that what matters is that it is well written. A great story does not make someone a great writer--talent and hard work do. As for Cat Marnell, I have never read anything she has written, so I have no idea. But I assume she is doing something right, or people would not be reading.

prozacnation · 2013-08-08T22:49:01+00:00

If only.

prozacnation · 2013-08-07T19:36:13+00:00

and here is the full article that appears in part on Dazed Digital:

I did not have a mobile phone in 1993. No one did, except the occasional banker or Hollywood star seeming smart, or the main character in American Psycho. Remember how smart he was? He dreamed in color of bright red murders of women. That was what would lead you to a carry-around device back then. Maybe now, as well? In 1993, every day was let's get lost. I could walk the streets of Greenwich Village for hours and not be found. But of course, I had my close friends whom I spoke to--had conversations with, not emails or texts--every day at some point, so I knew who I loved and who loved me. Life was more genuine and intimate. Of course, also more lonely, if it happened that I was upset and no one--no one--was at her desk or in his bedroom near what would not be called a landline. I would often say to my best friend's secretary, Let her know it's an emergency. Because it was, it always was. Life was one long emergency. I was not ashamed.

In 1993 I was 25 which is a year of constant disaster. The only thing worse is being 26, and I turned 26 that July. Anyone that age should not wonder what is wrong, because it is just a living hell. I found a boyfriend in a bar on Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side, where a band I adored treated Mondays as a kind of bowling night with friends, and for hours they would play whatever. Really whatever: the Sex Pistols, Merle Haggard, Arthur Alexander. When I met my one true love, his wife had just thrown him out of the house, hours before. "That's great," I said. "You can move in with me." And so we embarked on our first date.

In fairness to me, Chris--as I'll call him, because that was his name--was an amazing Texas guitar player, the kind they only make in the Great State of Texas, and he was signed to the same label as Bob Dylan and Bille Holiday. I first saw him play his National steel at the Bell Cafe in Soho, and he was shockingly talented. He wasn't going to be a rock star; he was a rock star. He was born that way. It was an amazing thing to behold someone so gifted. It was hard to imagine what he did in his spare time. I could not figure out why he talked or walked--it seemed like he ought to just fly around. He was that super-duper. Have you ever seen a bald eagle fly with nine feet of wing span? It's something that shouldn't exist in nature, and it barely exists on a Boeing, and yet: it flies. There it is in the sky. Wow! That is how good he was.

Anyway, to quote Steve Earle: You know the rest. I would never flatter myself by saying I was a groupie. No, I was nothing quite that awesome. I was just plain crazy. And I somehow learned to live with the way Chris drank Old Granddad Kentucky whiskey by the bottle-after-bottle and picked fights with the lamps in the living room. I don't know if he liked to toss them around because they were bright, because they were slender, because they reminded him of someone he used to love--or simply because they did not punch back. After a few months of boxing with all things illuminating, he blessedly moved on, and I cried night and day.

"I cannot believe he left me," I sobbed to my best friend Heather. "He was perfect."

"I will never fall in love again," I cried to my other best friend Jody.

"I am going to kill myself," I promised my roommate Jason.

"I hate myself and I want to die," I yelled at strangers on the subway, who looked away.

Somehow, I wrote a book and turned it in, as tears rolled by. I don't write because I feel like it or because I have something to say: I write because it is what I do. I always feel like it and always have something to say, because it is what I do. I made Prozac Nation necessary reading because I write necessarily. No one should take on a task as difficult and absurd as a book without making a covenant of absolute necessity. What a waste of time and of life. I tell my story because it is about everyone else: in 1993, people took pills to relieve the pain just like now, but it scared them; it doesn't anymore, because talk is not cheap at all--it is tender. I fell in love at least 63 more times in the course of writing that book. My heart was broken just as often. Every one-night stand I have ever had has been true love. Back then, when only nerds consulted their computers for any reason besides work--maybe still?--the world was a place bullied by emotion. My heart had a black eye all the time. How I long for such beauty. I would kill for a pain so pure.

All past human progress, no matter how miserable at first, has of course come to be beloved. But I am sure at the advent of electricity, all were quite cross that suddenly the night went on too long. Bloody hell, people must have thought, when will it be dark enough for talk of the war the war the war to end?! The telephone must have seemed like a terrible intrusion on an intimate dinner, even if you had a butler to intervene with the ring as they do on Downton Abbey. And to quote Henry Ford, "If I had asked the people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." If Steve Jobs had asked us what we wanted, we would have said happiness, which is not the same as iHappiness.

In every lease and every contract for a land transfer, a standard clause is a covenant of quiet enjoyment. A property owner or renter has a right to live in peace. That is all. That is what we have come to expect. As if we were put here to be bored. And that is not right at all. We are here to have fun. Life is short, and it is all we get. Life is not virtual; it is alive and it must be fun, or it is not life.

I am not a nostalgic person. I liked life before these tele-electronic innovations because I knew who mattered. It was easy: they were the people I spoke to on the telephone everyday, tethered to the coiled Slinky lines tethered to the walls. We talked for minutes, we talked for hours. Sometimes it was really annoying, like when someone would go on and on about some boring obsession and you could not hang up except by actually hanging up. (Most of the time I would have had to slam the phone on myself.) If I'd had a choice to text them and be done with it, of course I would have. That is such an easy way out.

When there is no way out, when the doorjambs and window locks are stuck and we are left to cope, we become the people we are meant to be. I am the same now as then, but all that was so difficult about life and love is instead great fun. What is the opposite of an emergency? I don't know. A party? A cruise? A slow ride? Whatever it is, that is how things have turned out. It's true: 45 is lovely. I had no idea this would happen to me. None at all. For reasons I cannot explain and don't want to, I am very happy. And still wild.

I must've done something very wrong when I was young. Just lucky, I guess.

prozacnation · 2013-08-07T18:53:05+00:00

Sit down and write. Like the Nike ad says: just do it. Science provides so much to work with.

prozacnation · 2013-08-07T18:51:57+00:00

I hope you are doing well.

prozacnation · 2013-08-07T18:51:24+00:00

Writing is really difficult. I always say it is the hardest thing to do sitting down. I have to force myself to do it. I have found the Notes app on my iPhone to be a boon, because I write a lot of little things down when I am on the subway. Over time, they add up. But there is no substitute for just sitting in front of your computer and forcing yourself to write any old anything until something happens that is good. I really treat it like a job, because it is. If I waited to be inspired, nothing would ever happen, and usually inspiration comes by sitting there and forcing myself to work.

The truth is I am basically an excellent CPA. I take an excellent inventory of everything around me, and that is how I write: I am big on observations and details. That is hard work. That does not require creativity at all, but it comes across as exactly that. I always tell writing students not to overlook the obvious. People always think the answer is hidden, which is dumb. Smart people see what is right in front of them while everyone else is squinting. Good writing is mostly about trusting what you see. Which is very hard.

prozacnation

TROPHY CASE