In New York media circles, Elizabeth Wurtzel was a fixture by turns beguiling and exhausting, her talent and troubles congenitally bound to one another. benjwallace writes
Elizabeth Wurtzel. Photo: Dan Callister/Shutterstock “You can’t be at your own funeral,” Elizabeth Wurtzel told a crowd of more than 1,000 people at the University of Wisconsin in 2004, when she was promoting Now, More, Again: A Memoir of Addiction. “It doesn’t really work out.” She was talking about how depressed people are given to fantasizing that people will miss them when they’re gone.
At Harvard, Wurtzel was already cultivating her dual role of author and character. Michael Hirschorn, who edited her at the Crimson, recalls publishing an article in which she wrote, “LET’S FACE IT: Lou Reed should be dead.” It “was full-throttle Wurtzel,” Hirschorn says, “her first piece containing 100 percent nuclear-grade Wurtzelism in concentrated form. It argued something like, ‘If Lou Reed really wanted credibility, he’d die.
Her first years out of college only cemented her polarizing reputation. She was extraordinarily successful for someone so young, landing an internship at the Dallas Morning News and jobs at New York and The New Yorker as a pop-music critic. But she also abruptly lost many of those gigs and was fired by the Dallas paper for making up quotes.
In 2011, Walter Kirn was taking part in the “Happy Endings” reading series at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater. He was the last of a few writers to take the stage. He was given 15 minutes to read and had been asked to do some kind of stunt afterward. For this, he’d arranged with Wurtzel to read from his evisceration of Prozac Nation. Wurtzel delightedly began reading the most vicious lines from the review, then started veering off on tangents.
New York’s David Wallace-Wells worked on her 2013 piece, her re–coming out, “Elizabeth Wurtzel Confronts Her One-Night Stand of a Life.” It was the most intense editing experience he’s had. “Within days of first emailing each other, it was texts at all hours about all subjects, totally off topic. In other words, she was more or less exactly how you’d expect her to be from reading her — unapologetically excessive in all ways.
A week and a half before Wurtzel died, her friend Alia Raza, who originally met her on Twitter, visited her in her hospital room. They talked about the MoMA and Hawaii and the new Beck album, which Wurtzel insisted she listen to. They laughed about another friend who had visited and obnoxiously complained about having “a sympathy headache.”
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