Sex, Drugs & God. - "More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction" - book review

National Review, March 11, 2002 by David Klinghoffer

More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction, by Elizabeth Wurtzel (Simon & Schuster, 333 pp., $25)

Elizabeth Wurtzel isn't exactly a household name, but she was briefly a phenomenon in the early-mid 1990s when her memoir Prozac Nation was published. At the time, judging from the obsessive media attention the drug was receiving, you might have thought every person in America was taking Prozac, an antidepressant that was supposed to peel away layers of bad false personality -- anxiety, sadness, compulsion -- to reveal the true happy you underneath. Wurtzel's book wasn't really about her Prozac prescription, though; its real theme was the way divorce damages children, who grow up to be damaged adults, as the author did following her own parents' divorce. Still, the fact that Wurtzel's book was called Prozac Nation seemed to crystallize the country's mood. It didn't hurt, either, that Wurtzel could be photographed to maximize a certain plaintive, pouty sex appeal.

Nor did it frustrate her publicists that she was a 27-year-old Harvard graduate -- and it is a reality of media coverage that whatever happens at Harvard or to people who went there is deemed newsworthy in a way that the same things, if they happen at Yale or Michigan or Berkeley, or to graduates of those or other universities, are not equally so. Even outside America, Wurtzel received rock-star treatment. I remember being in Stockholm in 1995 and seeing rows of Prozac Nation lined up in the front window of a big downtown bookstore. It has recently been made into a movie starring Christina Ricci, who looks a bit like Wurtzel.

A follow-up book, Bitch -- extolling famously difficult women in history -- stumbled when it developed that the author was strung out on cocaine throughout most of the publicity tour, tottering on the edge of incoherence in national TV appearances.

The new Wurtzel memoir brings us up to date. While she was writing Bitch, in a series of apartments in Ft. Lauderdale, she discovered a new drug: methylphenidate hydrochloride, or Ritalin. Her psychiatrist in New York had prescribed it for her, though Ritalin is thought of as being more suited to elementary-school children suffering from an inability to concentrate on homework. It focuses the mind by speeding it up. As Wurtzel soon found, crushed up and snorted it has an effect quite like cocaine.

Before long she is recounting the scary math by which an innocuous prescription for four pills daily turns into an addiction to 40 a day, supplemented by whatever other abuse-worthy drugs Wurtzel can lay hands on, having them FedExed from New York or swiping them from friends' medicine cabinets. We learn that plenty of familiar brands, meant to be swallowed, can be ground to powder and sniffed for a greatly enhanced psychotropic effect. Vicodin, Percocet, Tylenol 3, Demerol, Dalmane, Dilaudid, Xanax -- they all work. "Still," she recounts wryly, "I know that Ritalin is not supposed to be addictive, so I don't figure this is really a problem -- I decide it is simply odd behavior. Extremely odd behavior."

Before long she has made the transition to cocaine, which after all isn't merely like cocaine. Returning to New York, still working away obsessively on Bitch, she finally checks herself into a tony, preppy rehab facility in New Haven, Conn., where she falls in love with another brilliant Harvard grad: a drunk named Hank, who will later get her pregnant while he's in a Macallan-induced stupor. After four months in rehab, she relocates again, back to New York, and immediately relapses.

You learn a lot about drugs in this book. For instance, if you want to smuggle cocaine on a flight from Newark to Stockholm, a diaphragm comes in handy: "I take my diaphragm out of my pocketbook -- I've at least had the good sense to make plans for transporting contraband -- I put several little bags of coke into its cup, and then I insert it into myself and make sure it is firmly in place on my cervix. All done."

I didn't know that sniffing cocaine and watching pornography are so inextricably linked. There are also terrifying descriptions of what it's like to come down off a cocaine high that should give pause to the enthusiasts of drug legalization who have never themselves experienced coke or heroin.

The reason to read this book isn't, however, to get an idea of what drugs can do to a typical addict. Yes, Wurtzel gets arrested for shoplifting -- an experience familiar to habitual drug-abusers. But she is no Everywoman. Hardly a chapter goes by without our being reminded, indirectly, of the rich advances and royalties she must have made on Prozac Nation and Bitch. For a freelance writer, she drops serious cash: $60,000 here on rehab, $10,000 there for a contemplated plastic surgery for tummy-maintenance, an undisclosed amount to rent a Tribeca apartment, "this bright new place where the doormen are called concierges." The economics of being Elizabeth Wurtzel are so extravagant that the reader is left puzzled, unable to make it all add up, since she emphasizes that (unlike what seems to be the large majority of artistic types in New York) she doesn't come from family money.