Wurtzel herself seems confused as to how much she wants to be remembered for her well-crafted pathologies rather than her literature. “I don’t know what to do if I am not inspiring some sort of false fascination,” she confesses in More, Now, Again, in typically articulate reflexivity.
“It’s very ironic as the audience for books has gotten more rarefied, and all these people complain that not enough people read, it should make people happy when a book or an author is accessible,” Wurtzel says when asked about the criticisms of her work. “But instead, it makes them nervous, and it makes them feel like there’s some reason not to take it seriously.”
At the suggestion that those critics might be afraid that celebrity culture is infecting books, which they regard as a last refuge where looks or personality are inconsequential beside the words on the page, she replies, with some heat, “That’s so stupid! It doesn’t have to matter; it can go either way. I mean, Radiohead: does anybody really care about Thom Yorke’s personality? I don’t think so. But everybody cares about Courtney Love’s personality, and Hole sells records. It doesn’t have to be any one way.” (Notably, Entertainment Weekly called Wurtzel “the Courtney Love of letters,” referring perhaps to their shared ability to interest the world in their cycles of audacity and crisis.)
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“Lizzie Was Doing Drugs,” booms the headline of a New York Daily news cover. It originally referred to scandal-ridden socialite Lizzie Grubman, but here, framed and prominently displayed on a shelf in Wurtzel’s apartment, the joke needs no explanation.
Wurtzel is still moving in, so the apartment carries that quality of frenzied transition, laden with piles of books and records. Wurtzel offers to show me a draft for the trailer of Prozac Nation. It blinks on, dreamy and wordless, drifting on the sound of Lou Reed singing “Perfect Day.”
“It’s very eerie,” says Wurtzel, standing back to watch Christina Ricci looking lost and haunted. “She looks just like me back then.” Though there’s little apparent physical resemblance, there is something surprisingly similar, a wild-eyed quality mingled with composure.
What was it like watching her life’s travails enacted onscreen? “Upsetting,” she says. “I was weeping. Everyone was. You are constantly trapped in someone’s hell.”
Wurtzel only has praise for the performances of the actors, which, in addition to Ricci and Lange, include such youthful stars as Jason Biggs, Jonathan Rhys-Myers and Michelle Williams.
She curls up in an armchair, more relaxed now, to return to the troubling topics of persona and confession. “If I only thought people could get some creepy thrill from it, that would be horrendous,” she muses, stroking her cat. “There is a message of redemption. And to not get across the message of human possibility would be bad. But if it’s not a fun story, it’s not a story worth telling.”