Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women
Elizabeth Wurtzel, an ex-rock critic forThe New Yorker, won controversial fame with her bestselling 1994 memoirProzac Nation: Young and Depressed in America, which described how Prozac saved the precocious Harvard grad from suicide. Her second book,Bitchis a celebration of the defiant, rock & roll spirit of self-destructive women through the ages: Delilah, Amy Fisher, Princess Di, and hundreds more (including the awesomely reckless Wurtzel). There is no comprehensible central line of argument, perhaps because the author did her exhaustive research and writing on a speedy Kerouacesque drug binge that, by her own admission, sent her to rehab upon the book's conclusion. But Wurtzel has the remains of a fine mind: her insights are often sharp, sometimes bitchy, and always shameless as she zooms in a very few pages fromThe Oresteiato O.J. to her first crush on a fictional character (Heathcliff) to Jim Thompson'sThe Killer Inside Me,Richard Pryor, Chrissie Hynde,Leaving Las Vegas,Gone with the Wind, Sylvia Plath's "Daddy,"Schindler's List,Oliver!,Carousel, andAndrea Dworkin. Most pop culture pundits incline to grandiose blather, but Wurtzel is punchy, and her quotes are more often apt than pretentious.Bitchis like a Mr. Toad's Wild Ride in a library, with frequent rampages through the film and music archives. Like rock music, Wurtzel's prose style lives for the moment. She glories in breaking rules to bits, is never giddier than when she's saying something shocking, and apparently has no moral code except self-expression--with the attitude volume knob cranked up to 11.--Tim Appelo--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.