https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/08/with-prozac-nation-elizabeth-wurtzel-blew-open-the-memoir-as-we-know-it

A daringly unvarnished account of desperate self-absorption, this startling debut redrew the boundaries of confessional writing

‘I Hate Myself and I Want to Die.” With the title of her prologue Elizabeth Wurtzel starts as she means to go on. Prozac Nation, published just over 25 years ago, was raw and in-your-face, a bald, bold bid for our attention. She was 27 when she threw open this unvarnished account of her dive into the black of depression, into a regime of pills – Prozac was only one of the many medications she was treated with – and darkness. In the book’s early pages she set out her stall, describing the creep of her illness, its deadly pull. “You won’t even notice it coming on, thinking that it is somehow normal, something about getting older, about turning eight or turning 12 or turning 15, and then one day you realise that your entire life is just awful, not worth living, a horror and a black blot on the white terrain of human existence. One morning you wake up afraid you are going to live.”

Related: Elizabeth Wurtzel, journalist and author of Prozac Nation, dies aged 52