More, Now, Again - Softcover

Wurtzel, Elizabeth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1860499899 ISBN 13: 9781860499890

Publisher: Virago, 2003

Synopsis

It had reached the point where she couldn't go more than five minutes without grinding up a pill and snorting it. Despite the worldwide success of her groundbreaking memoir, Prozac Nation - and the fame and accolades that accompanied it - nothing had changed inside Elizabeth Wurtzel. She saw herself as a terrible failure. She couldn't maintain a relationship. She was fired from every job she held. Exhausted from trying to make sense of a world she saw as increasingly phony, she left New York and headed for Florida. But not before securing from her psychiatrist a prescription for Ritalin (the drug prescribed to treat hyper-activity in children).

This is an astonishing and timely memoir. It's about the search for happiness, about depravity and the will to survive even the most breathtaking self-abuse.

About this title

Product Description:

Generation X poster girl for depression ('Prozac Nation') and celebrator of 'difficult women' ('Bitch'), Elizabeth Wurtzel offers a searingly honest tale of her descent into Ritalin addiction and her eventual recovery.

Review:

From its demanding title, one quickly gathers this is no skip through the bluebells. More, Now, Again is the latest instalment in the confessional canon of Elizabeth Wurtzel, the tortured, talented author of Prozac Nation, who, by her own confession, has always pathologically "needed more". After her addiction therapist prescribes her Ritalin, a form of "mild speed" to take her mind off other drugs, and to help her "focus", she finds the pills lack the nasal intimacy of cocaine, so after a while, she starts pulverising them to produce something snortable. Suddenly she's on her way to another dependency, 40 pills a day, and another couple of years of strung-out, narcissistic desperation on the long and whiney road, bouncing between monomaniac spells in Florida and New York. It's not exactly for the pull-yourself-together brigade.

All of this would be unbearable for all concerned, were it not for Wurtzel's resilient, often bleakly humorous writing. Unashamedly exhibitionist, there is little she refrains from laying bare, including the obsessive tweezering of her legs to produce a mottle of sores and abscesses, ruthlessly playing on friendships to facilitate her habit and jagging her psyche until the only relationship she cares about is with the powder. Of course, when she finally steels herself, or fragments enough, to try rehab, she unravels something of her sense of "terminal uniqueness", as the lingo goes. Though before she can come clean there are to be countless relapses, criminal arrest, a torturous fixation on an alcoholic, a renewal of her cocaine habit, professional crises as she writes and promotes her previous book Bitch, and an abortion. The cumulative effect is less a cry for help as a suffocating Banshee-like squall. To come out of this blue period, to shift from Generation X to Generation Why, is achieved through will power and NA group therapy, 12 steps not to heaven but at least sobriety, and a determination to take personal responsibility for ending a familial legacy of abuse. At times you want to shake her, other times hug her, yet she remains one of the most savvy and provocative writers of contemporary non-fiction; how she handles happiness, though, may prove her biggest challenge.--David Vincent

About this edition

• Publisher: Virago
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1860499899
• ISBN 13: 9781860499890
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448