Rhymes With Kitsch

by Ram Murali

Elizabeth Wurtzel stunned the nation with her 1994 autobiography, Prozac Nation, a portrayal of her struggle with clinical depression during childhood and her years at Harvard, where she often points out she was educated. The back of my copy says that Vanity Fair called it “thoughtful” and “very brave.”

I thought the book was supremely terrible and was without question one of the worst books I’ve ever read. Imagine my trepidation when I was asked to review her latest opus, Bitch.

Wurtzel poses topless on the cover of Bitch, with a slightly sexy, bad-girl smile on her face. Her middle finger is extended and forms the “I” in the title. It’s an interesting cover. She looks really good.

I was attracted to her picture until I remembered the lurking horrors within her mind. Prozac Nation depicted her as the Girlfriend From Hell, the kind of girl who would poison your dog and pour sugar into your gas tank.

The title alone told me that I was probably going to be subjected to wild ranting. I wondered if the title was autobiographical. After Prozac Nation, I already thought Elizabeth Wurtzel was a bitch. A stupid bitch. At times, a dirty bitch.

Imagine my surprise, and slight dismay, at finding out that I didn’t hate this book. I wouldn’t say that I loved it, but it was definitely a good book. Frighteningly enough, she actually had a few worthwhile things to say.

In Bitch, Wurtzel writes five essays which are loosely about specific characters who are classic “bitches” or powerful women. The women she focuses on are Delilah (of the Samson and Delilah story), Amy Fisher, Margaux Hemingway, Hillary Clinton, and Nicole Brown Simpson. The essays discuss many other subjects, though, often delving into Wurtzel’s impressive knowledge of film and music (she started out her writing career as a music critic for The New Yorker).

Let me preface the rest of this by saying, however, that Elizabeth Wurtzel cannot write. Her prose is tiresomely awful and difficult to wade through. Her sentences are long and obtuse, often occupying much of a page. An example: “Here’s my point: I have no quarrel with The Rules or the advice it gives — it actually seems pretty sound to me — but if we had really come a long way, baby, if men’s perceptions of women had transformed fundamentally and intensely so that we were accepted as full-fledged sexual creatures and romantic operatives who were free to chase or be chased, and if this expanded dimension of women’s sexual personae were not frightening and overwhelming to them, then we would not need The Rules.”

Excuse me? That was ONE SENTENCE.

The situation grows even worse as you wade all the way through a sentence, searching vainly, desperately, for a verb or a subject or a predicate, coming to a period several lines down the page, and realizing it wasn’t a sentence at all. A sentence fragment. Nothing wrong with sentence fragments. But mine are short.

Her writing style is so bad that if you weren’t to read the book closely, you wouldn’t know that she has some really interesting and good ideas about women, about gender, about our society.

Wurtzel is a very modern feminist. Her book is not a rant about evil men and oppressed women, but rather examines values which we place on men and on women. She spends as much of the book bashing women as she does bashing men.

She feels that, in many cases, women who are seen as bitches are merely those who “go for it.” “Bad girls understand that there is no point in being good and suffering in silence. What good has good ever done?...And we’re still stuck with Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court. So why be good?”

She goes on to talk about Anita Hill and Princess Diana as examples of women for whom being good came to naught. She points out that Anita Hill, by all definitions a good woman, “who chooses to live in Norman, Oklahoma...still had to listen to Orrin Hatch read to her from The Exorcist.”

I found the first chapter of the book, which deals with the story of Samson and Delilah, to be rather boring. The book starts to pick up in the second chapter, where Wurtzel looks at Amy Fisher, the “Long Island Lolita” who, at the age of seventeen, shot the wife of her lover.

Wurtzel often makes startlingly astute observations. Her discussion of Amy Fisher leads into a fascinating discourse on the values society places on teenage women. For example, when discussing the phenomenon of teenage actresses: “What has happened to these girls? Most did not live up to their initial promise...they faded away, published bad poetry like Ally Sheedy, became full-time manic depressives like Patty Duke, chose bad roles repeatedly like Juliette Lewis...became ridiculous like Tatum O’Neill.”
She goes on to point out that the best-case scenario for these actresses is to die young. In the next chapter, she deals with one who didn’t die young enough: Margaux Hemingway.

Famous in the seventies as a model and actress, she slipped into oblivion and eventually committed suicide in August 1996. The chapter mulls over images of female depression and suicide, focusing on poets such as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and characters such as Zelda Fitzgerald.

What leads women to such depths? “Behavior that is mistaken for any number of things - lasciviousness, insanity and bitchiness above all - is rarely mistaken for what it actually is, for one of the oft-forgotten sins against society, the illness at the center of so many ills: despair.”

The grammatical horror of the sentence notwithstanding, she has a point. The myths of these women comes only through their death. “Once dead,” she writes, “they become mental-health pornography.”

For all her keen observations, there are moments - little “Elizabeth’s-stopped-taking-her-medication” moments - of such oddity that they are basically inexcusable. She informs us that she generally performs oral sex on first dates. She theorizes that every woman should have lost her virginity to James Taylor in the early 1970’s. She mistakenly refers to the Bruce Springsteen song “Brilliant Disguise” as “Brilliant Surprise.”

But in the end, I suppose it doesn’t make all that much of a difference. Bitch made me think more than anything I’ve read in a long time. I have a lot of respect for a lot of what Wurtzel wrote in this book. It’s thought-provoking, somewhat logical, and very interesting. Still, I would recommend the audio-cassette version over the hard copy.