Why I love Elizabeth Wurtzel

So Elizabeth Wurtzel is catching scorn again, this time for a meandering assessment of her life as a gorgeous and brilliant unmarried woman of forty-something unprepared for retirement, published as a serious bit of journalism in the New York Magazine. A word dump, complains one blogger. For another, the piece induces winces; its author is someone who refuses to grow up, even though she is alienating her former fans. Still another describes it as a dishonest piece that never addresses its stated purpose, a discussion of the the author's financial crash. If only Wurtzel had written about her messy finances, like she promised she was going to do. Still one more blogger, while only marginally more positive (the piece, she opines, is embarrassing although compulsively readable), gets closer to what I think the thing is really all about: to its cultural significance and what gets missed in all the trashing. As this blogger explains, the piece is not a call to action, a way of making readers grasp the political significance of their personal problems. Rather, its purpose is to make all of us readers feel like the bevy or losers that we are while recognizing how unique Elizabeth Wurtzel is. Yes. I say, yes. This is precisely the purpose of the piece. But my perspective differs from this blogger's in that this is what I value in the piece. Put another way, I love Wurtzel's literary persona because it is the closest thing that we have to a female Jack Kerouac, whose purpose in writing was of course to make his readers feel like pathetic clowns.

Maybe you have to love Kerouac to care about Wurtzel, and I suppose that not everyone finds his solipsistic rambles through his drunken trips to Big Sur and his complete breakdowns as uplifitng as I do. Certainly William F. Buckley didn't - he didn't even bother to conceal his smug disdain during his interiews of the inebriated writer. But all you have to do is watch the interview to understand exactly what Wurtzel is thumbing her nose at and the place from which she draws her strength: the knowledge that at least she will never be the smirking female equivalent of William F. Buckley. Back to Kerouac: that gorgeous nutty tirade where we learn that we are all a pack of sad clowns articulates for me like nothing else the central mystery of life. We are all just yelling into the great nothingness: the only question is whether we do it with bravado and style or Prufrock-like stiltedness. My perduring chagrin regarding Kerouac has always been that he has no female equivalent - where is there a female literary persona who is alcoholic, incoherent, marginal, disorderly, and yet brilliant and, most of all, desirable, a permanent rock star?

And yet, she is there: you just have to switch genres. We have to look to that weird sort of semi-fictitious journalistic thing that pretty much everybody is doing today, the “memoir” essay. Wurtzel could not sell a novel, not in a million years. But neither could Kerouac today. Wurtzel’s genius is to have glommed on to the one genre by means of which she can sell her work. She, like Kerouac, IS her work. And thus she has given us our female Kerouac. I love her, every idiotic, puerile scream of rage. Every piece, major or minor, reminds us that she is out there incarnating the being whose absence I so regretted as a teenager reading the male “greats,” those loutish drunken buffoons (Hemingway, Mailer) who did whatever they wanted and still remained sexy. So I send out my sincerest thanks to Wurtzel. Wouldn’t actually want to be her (and she certainly wouldn’t want to be me), but I need her.

http://nymag.com/thecut/2013/01/elizabeth-wurtzel-on-self-help.html.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/01/07/elizabeth_wurtzel_in_new_york_magazine_confessional_writing_hits_bottom.html.

http://www.rolereboot.org/culture-and-politics/details/2013-01-a-difficult-woman-why-elizabeth-wurtzel-is-a-narciss.

http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/111690/elizabeth-wurtzels-shocking-discreetness.

http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2013/01/08/1412101/elizabeth-wurtzel-in-new-york-magazine-confessional-writing-and-feminism/?mobile=nc.