New Releases by Elizabeth Wurtzel

Elizabeth Wurtzel's New York Times best-selling memoir, with a new afterword "Sparkling, luminescent prose . . . A powerful portrait of one girl's journey through the purgatory of depression and back." —New York Times "A book that became a cultural touchstone." —New Yorker Elizabeth Wurtzel writes with her finger on the faint pulse of an overdiagnosed generation whose ruling icons are Kurt Cobain, Xanax, and pierced tongues. Her famous memoir of her bouts with depression and skirmishes with drugs, Prozac Nation is a witty and sharp account of the psychopharmacology of an era for readers of Girl, Interrupted and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.

From the author of the bestselling Prozac Nation comes one of the most entertaining feminist manifestos ever written. In five brilliant extended essays, she links the lives of women as demanding and disparate as Amy Fisher, Hillary Clinton, Margaux Hemingway, and Nicole Brown Simpson. Wurtzel gives voice to those women whose lives have been misunderstood, who have been dismissed for their beauty, their madness, their youth. Bitch is a brilliant tract on the history of manipulative female behavior. By looking at women who derive their power from their sexuality, Wurtzel offers a trenchant cultural critique of contemporary gender relations. Beginning with Delilah, the first woman to supposedly bring a great man down (latter-day Delilahs include Yoko Ono, Pam Smart, Bess Myerson), Wurtzel finds many biblical counterparts to the men and women in today's headlines. She finds in the story of Amy Fisher the tragic plight of all Lolitas, our thirst for their brief and intense flame. She connects Hemingway's tragic suicide to those of Sylvia Plath, Edie Sedgwick, and Marilyn Monroe, women whose beauty was an end, ultimately, in itself. Wurtzel, writing about the wife/mistress dichotomy, explains how some women are anointed as wife material, while others are relegated to the role of mistress. She takes to task the double standard imposed on women, the cultural insistence on goodness and society's complete obsession with badness: what's a girl to do? Let's face it, if women were any real threat to male power, "Gennifer Flowers would be sitting behind the desk of the Oval Office," writes Wurtzel, "and Bill Clinton would be a lounge singer in the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock." Bitch tells a tale both celebratory and cautionary as Wurtzel catalogs some of the most infamous women in history, defending their outsize desires, describing their exquisite loneliness, championing their take-no-prisoners approach to life and to love. Whether writing about Courtney Love, Sally Hemings, Bathsheba, Kimba Wood, Sharon Stone, Princess Di--or waxing eloquent on the hideous success of The Rules, the evil that is The Bridges of Madison County, the twisted logic of You'll Never Make Love in This Town Again--Wurtzel is back with a bitchography that cuts to the core. In prose both blistering and brilliant, Bitch is a treatise on the nature of desperate sexual manipulation and a triumph of pussy power.

Though she might not always follow her own advice, Elizabeth Wurtzel knows certain things to be true: Doing copious amounts of drugs leads nowhere you want to be; trying to be friends with your ex is always a bad idea; if you can’t afford to hire a mover, you can’t afford to move; and always doing the best you can is always good enough. Here are Wurtzel’s succinct and clever rules for living your best life. Fulfillment is within everyone’s reach. Grasping it takes enjoying your mistakes, being strong, and having opinions. Today’s woman should: • Be Gorgeous. Make the absolute most of what you’ve got. Believe that you are gorgeous, and you will be. It’s the only trick that really works. • Embrace Fanaticism. Harness joie de vivre by pursuing insane interests, consuming passions, and constant sources of gratification that do not depend on the approval of others. • Use All Available Resources. Let the M.D.s and the Ph.D.s help you solve your problems so that you don’t become everyone else’s problem. • Never Clear the Table at a Dinner Party Unless the Men Get Up to Help First. Cleanup should not be gendered. Change the world, one dinner table at a time. Hold a sit-in. One of the fiercest, funniest, and best-known essayists of her generation, Elizabeth Wurtzel infuses this modest gem of a rule book with a sharp wit and a real candor.

This is the brutally honest account of Wurtzel's descent into drug addiction and how she managed to break free from Ritalin to love life and herself.

Miss Wurtzel is back, and this time she's armed with advice for the modern woman. She's found the secret of life, and it's within everyone's reach. It's about enjoying your mistakes. It's about being strong. It's about eating dessert. It's about having opinions. It's about adoring feminism. It's about embracing fanaticism. It's also about saying your prayers, not overpacking, and making your boyfriend do the dishes.. Some of her words of wisdom: - Think Productively: It's not that you have to see it to believe it; on the contrary, you have to believe it to see it. - Be Gorgeous: I myself believe that I am about ten times prettier than I actually am. By dint of sheer will power, I have managed to convince many people of this. - Enjoy Your Single Years: Do not think that the whole point of being single is being married; men don't think this way, and neither should you. In Radical Sanity, these lessons, and many more, are delivered with the sharp wit and candor we've come to expect -- and love -- from Elizabeth Wurtzel.

This volume is the author's take on the best-selling dating guide, The Rules. Chapter headings include Have Pets, When All Else Fails, Talk to God and Don't Clear the Table at a Dinner Party Unless the Men Get Up to Help Too.