Elizabeth Wurtzel
Elizabeth Wurtzel was born in New York City, New York, United States on July 31st, 1967 and is the Novelist. At the age of 52, Elizabeth Wurtzel biography, profession, age, height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, measurements, education, career, dating/affair, family, news updates, and networth are available.
At 52 years old, Elizabeth Wurtzel has this physical status:
Elizabeth Lee Wurtzel (born July 31, 1967) is an American writer and journalist, known for publishing her best-selling memoir Prozac Nation, at the age of 26.
She holds a BA in comparative literature from Harvard College and a JD from Yale Law School.
Early life
Wurtzel grew up in a Jewish family on the Upper West Side of New York City and attended the Ramaz School. Her parents, Lynne Winters and Donald Wurtzel, divorced when she was young, and Wurtzel was primarily raised by her mother, who worked in publishing and as a media consultant. In a 2018 article in The Cut, Wurtzel wrote that she discovered in 2016 that her biological father was photographer Bob Adelman, who had worked with her mother in the 1960s.
As described in her memoir Prozac Nation, Wurtzel's depression began between the ages of 10 and 12. Wurtzel admitted to cutting herself when she was in adolescence, and of spending her teenage years in an environment of emotional angst, substance misuse, bad relationships, and frequent fights with family members. A gifted student, Wurtzel went on to attend Harvard College, where she continued to struggle with depression and substance abuse.
Personal life
Wurtzel met photo editor and aspiring novelist James Freed Jr. in October 2013 at an addiction-themed reading. They became engaged in September 2014 and married in May 2015, while she was undergoing therapy. The couple later separated, but remained close. They completed their divorce papers, but never filed them; they were still married when she died.
In a 2018 article in The Cut, Wurtzel wrote that she discovered in 2016 that her biological father was photographer Bob Adelman, who had worked with her mother in the 1960s. As a result, she labeled herslf a bastard.
In February 2015, Wurtzel announced she had breast cancer, "which like many things that happen to women is mostly a pain in the ass. But compared with being 26 and crazy and waiting for some guy to call, it's not so bad. If I can handle 39 breakups in 21 days, I can get through cancer." She said of her double mastectomy and reconstruction, "It is quite amazing. They do both at the same time. You go in with breast cancer and come out with stripper boobs."
Wurtzel died in Manhattan from leptomeningeal disease as a complication of metastasized breast cancer on January 7, 2020, at age 52.
Her personal effects were sold at auction two years later.
Early career
While an undergraduate at Harvard in the late 1980s, Wurtzel wrote for The Harvard Crimson and received the 1986 Rolling Stone College Journalism Award for a piece about Lou Reed. She also interned at The Dallas Morning News, but was fired after being accused of plagiarism. She received a B.A. degree in comparative literature from Harvard in 1989.
Wurtzel subsequently moved to Greenwich Village in New York City and found work as a pop music critic for The New Yorker and New York Magazine. The New York Times book critic Ken Tucker characterized her contributions to the former publication as "unintentionally hilarious." In 1997 Dwight Garner wrote in Salon.com that her column "was so roundly despised that I sometimes felt like its only friend in the world."
Writing career
While an intern at the Dallas Morning News, Wurtzel was fired, reportedly for plagiarism, although a 2002 The New York Times interview suggested that she had fabricated quotations in an article that was never published.
Wurtzel wrote regularly for The Wall Street Journal.
On September 21, 2008, after the suicide of writer David Foster Wallace, Wurtzel wrote an article for New York magazine about the time she had spent with him. She acknowledged that "I never knew David well."
In January 2009, she wrote an article for The Guardian, arguing that the vehemence of opposition demonstrated in Europe to Israel's actions in the 2008–2009 Israel–Gaza conflict, when compared to the international reaction to human rights abuses in the People's Republic of China, Darfur, and Arab countries, suggested an antisemitic undercurrent fueling the outrage.
In 2009, Wurtzel published an article in Elle magazine about societal pressures related to aging. Regretting her youth of casual sex and drug-taking, and realizing that she was not as beautiful as she once had been, she reflected that "whoever said youth is wasted on the young actually got it wrong; it's more that maturity is wasted on the old."
Wurtzel's publisher, Penguin, sued her in September 2012 in an effort to reclaim a $100,000 advance for a 2003 book contract for "a book for teenagers to help them cope with depression" that Wurtzel failed to complete. Of the $100,000, Penguin advanced Wurtzel $33,000 and sought interest of $7,500, claiming to have suffered detriment at Wurtzel's expense. The case was dismissed with prejudice in 2013.
In early 2013, Wurtzel published a New York magazine article lamenting the unconventional choices she had made in life, including heroin use and spending much of a lucrative publisher advance on a costly Birkin bag, and her failure to marry, form a family, buy a house, save money or invest for retirement. "At long last, I had found myself vulnerable to the worst of New York City, because at 44 my life was not so different from the way it was at 24," she wrote. The article was widely criticized. In Slate, Amanda Marcotte called the piece Wurtzel's "latest word dump" and remarked that it was "as lengthy as it is incoherent."
Writing in The New Republic, Noreen Malone said of the piece that "Wurtzel wants us to know that she's a mess, and kindly invites us to rubberneck." Prachi Gupta for Salon characterized the essay as "rambling" and "self-involved." In The New Yorker, Meghan Daum called the piece "self-aggrandizing, disjointed, and, in its most egregious moments, leaves the impression that her editors might have been egging her on—or worse, taking advantage of what sometimes looks like a fairly precarious psychological state—in order to ensure maximum blogospheric outrage." By contrast, in The New Yorker Jia Tolentino called the piece "one of the best things she ever wrote."
In January 2015, Wurtzel published a short book titled Creatocracy under Thought Catalog's publishing imprint, TC Books. It is based on the thesis she wrote about intellectual property law upon graduation from Yale Law school.
