“But day after day of depression, the kind that doesn’t seem to merit carting me off to a hospital but allows me to sit here on this stoop in summer camp as if I were normal, day after day wearing down everybody who gets near me. My behavior seems, somehow, not acute enough for them to know what to do with me, though I’m just enough of a mess to be driving everyone around me crazy.”

American writer, journalist, and lawyer

Elizabeth Lee Wurtzel was an American writer, journalist, and lawyer. She is best known for Prozac Nation, her confessional memoir published when she was 27, and for being seen as a voice of Generation X. Her writing often examined her own experiences with depression, addiction, work, and relationships. In the 1990s, her books helped fuel the rise of confessional writing and the personal memoir. Later in life, she briefly worked as an attorney before she died of breast cancer.