Monday, June 16, 2008

Elizabeth Wurtzel

Elizabeth Wurtzel is the author of Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America: A Memoir, Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women, The Secret of Life: Commonsense Advice for Uncommon Women, and More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction.

I recently asked her what she was reading. Her reply:
I'm afraid the answer is rather depressing: I'm studying for the New York bar exam, so I am mostly reading study books on civil and criminal procedure, real property, commercial paper and all the things they don't teach at Yale Law School. YLS is, by the way, a minor cult of the Constitution in the middle of Connecticut. Wonderful place, kind of a legal encampment held together by chewing gum and toothpicks and a registrar's office, but not a lot of law taught here.

In my spare time, I am trying to read the manuscript to Love Junkie by my friend Rachel Resnick, because I want to blurb it. But I'm having a hard time getting it done.

If I ever have time to read again, I'm looking forward to The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein and The Future of The Internet by Jonathan Zittrain, who teaches law at Oxford and Harvard. Also, I'm dying to read the new novel by Darin Strauss, More Than It Hurts You, which is supposed to be amazing.
Read Wurtzel's March 18, 2008 Op-Ed in the Los Angeles Times, "Bitter Ashes of Burned Brassieres." Her bottom line(s):
Feminism, which was meant to be fun, has lately started to seem so sour. Men, particularly married men, often dislike Hillary Clinton, and I suspect that it's because she represents the unsexy wing of the women's movement. She comes across as nearly neutered, as the woman whose husband would cheat on her -- and, in fact, we know he did. But it cannot be the case that we went through all that bra-burning and consciousness-raising to be left choosing between, yet again, the madonna or the whore. Balance is difficult. But we can do it; we're women. Like Ginger Rogers, we've been doing everything that men do, only backward and in high heels, for a very long time.
--Marshal Zeringue