Elizabeth Wurtzel, a controversial writer whose work will live on

Wurtzel, a journalist, lawyer and author of "Prozac Nation," died this week of complications from breast cancer. She was just 52.

Her obstinance in the face of her cancer diagnosis was almost uncomfortable to see. Last year, in a column for the Guardian, she nonsensed everyone who had told her "sorry" about her illness, declaring: "Everyone else can hate cancer. I don't."

She continued: "I like the person I am with cancer and because of cancer.... I evolved. I am a student of curing the brokedown mirror that shards the brain." She became an advocate for testing for the BRCA genetic mutation, which she unknowingly carried and which caused her cancer.

As was typical in her previous writings about depression, feminism and other topics, she made no allowances for deviating perspectives. She gave only hers.

Wurtzel assimilated cancer into her persona in her 50s in the same way she had depression in her 20s. In "Prozac Nation," decades before her actual cancer diagnosis, she compared the two.

She wrote of her depression: "At first its tumorous mass is not even noticeable to the careful eye, and then, one day -- wham! -- this thing your own body has produced is actually trying to kill you... Slowly, over the years, the data will accumulate in your heart and mind, a computer program for total negativity that will build into your system, making life feel more and more unbearable."

Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of 'Prozac Nation,' has died at 52

Whatever they might think of Wurtzel co-opting a disease she had never had as a metaphor, the reader is left in no doubt as to what she meant. Over the years though, reviewers -- especially male ones -- became increasingly merciless about her writing.

On Salon.com in 2002, Peter Kurth called her third memoir, "More, Now, Again" -- which was about her Ritalin addiction and tweezing habits -- "dysfunctional," adding: "Wake up dead next time and you might have a book on your hands."

Toby Young wrote -- without a hint of irony, considering his own famously self-indulgent memoir -- that: "Wurtzel's overweening self-regard oozes from every sentence."

Kurth's note that she might be more interesting if she died was not only callous: it disallowed any possibility that her experience -- or her expressive, sometimes staccato, sometimes melodic writing -- might have worth in and of itself. It was pathetic of her to be messed up, but she needed to be even more messed up to merit anyone's attention. With 2020 hindsight, this smacks keenly of sexism -- not to mention a poor understanding of mental illness.

When James Frey's addiction memoir "A Million Little Pieces" came out just a couple years after "More, Now, Again" in 2003, it was met with almost universal praise. Bret Easton Ellis called it "Inspirational and essential," and he was compared to Hunter S. Thompson by The Observer. It later turned out that Frey had fabricated large chunks of the book. Later prints of his book included a note apologizing to readers, in which he explained that he had written about the person he'd created to help him "cope," rather than reality. His next two books were bestsellers, and "A Million Little Pieces" was made into a movie last year.

By contrast, the main complaint Wurtzel received for her memoirs was that they focused too much on, well, herself.

Though this was apparently more than the bare minimum expected of her male contemporaries, Wurtzel usually beat reviewers to self-criticism. In her second book, "Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women," which came out in 1998, she wrote: "In all likelihood, the only man who will ever like me as I am will probably need to believe I am someone else at first."

She also wrote eloquently -- and presciently -- about the expectations placed on women to compensate for men's unwillingness to adapt their behavior toward the opposite sex, and the exhausting standards to which women -- not men -- hold themselves.

It was the futility of ever pleasing everybody, and the unfairness of women being expected to do so, which she said spurred her to decide she was "sick" of this status quo. This, Wurtzel explained, was the appeal of the "bitch" persona: "It is the illusion of liberation, of libertine abandon. What if you want to be large in a world that would want you to be small or diminished."

Wurtzel made herself large. As a pioneer of the confessional memoir, she wrote exhaustively (and exhaustingly) about her depression, self-harm, drug abuse and her particular female existence at a time before such a thing was really done. In doing so, she paved the way for writers like Cat Marnell and Lena Dunham, and gave voice to conditions and experiences which were hitherto tucked ashamedly away.

Her legacy of writing, and baring every ugly, square-peg-in-round-hole element of herself -- even when people dismissed her as narcissistic and self-indulgent, even when she really was both those things -- will remain vital in a world where she so often turned out to have been right all along.

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