caitri | A Book a Day: Prozac Nation

Every day I'm posting an image of a book I like. Today I'm gonna flashback to the 90s, when confessional literature was a new and cutting edge thing. (Aw 90s.) I tried rereading this back in the winter when I read that Wurtzel passed away from cancer, and it did not hold up that well, I think. But I devoured her books in the early 2000s; More, Now, Again was pretty searing, and Bitch had its moments of gold amid some dross. But Prozac Nation started it all, and had a fairly decent movie adaptation with Christina Ricci as well. What I particularly liked about this book was how it tackled mental health issues in the public sphere before mass culture was ready to talk about them--which is why this book is important and why it ages so poorly. Talking about clinical depression now is very, very different than it was in the 90s, and while it's no cakewalk certainly, there is some general awareness that it is a medical condition to be managed, at least, rather than any number of less savory explanations that some people still try to cling to.