Elizabeth Wurtzel

“One of those blond pundits from cable TV?” The man wedged in next to me on an interminable five-hour flight had mistaken doe-eyed writer Elizabeth Wurtzel for the harder-edged Ann Coulter. “Nah,” I told him. “She wrote Prozac Nation, which was just made into a movie. She wrote this one about getting strung out on Ritalin.” “Ah,” he said, nodding knowingly. “An airplane book.” That it is. Wurtzel, perhaps the queen of drugged-out Gen-X solipsism, goes on for 333 pages about getting hooked on prescription speed, mixing it with coke, shoplifting, screwing guys while watching porn and kvetching about her poor trust-fund-subsidized life while curled on the bathroom floor in the fetal position. Eventually, she winds up in rehab. Jerry Stahl’s Permanent Midnight it ain’t, but it kept my mind off worse things while getting knocked around Midwestern skies by nasty thunderstorms one night last week.