Author and journalist Elizabeth Wurtzel has died at the age of 52.
Wurtzel, best known for her work "Prozac Nation," died from metastatic breast cancer in Manhattan. She'd tested positive for the BRCA gene, and was a staunch advocate in her work for testing.
An only child, Wurzel grew up in New York City and used her depression diagnosis to prompt much of her work. She attended Harvard.
At 27, she wrote her 1994 memoir "Prozac Nation," dissecting her depression, and the widespread use of prescription medicine across the U.S.
Kirkus called the book "an excruciating portrait of, even cause for, depression. This most certainly is not an examination of a generation's collective psyche."
In 2018, Wurtzel wrote a piece for the "Cut" revealing that the man she thought was her father was not, and her real father was Bob Adelman, a photographer made famous by his photos of Martin Luther King Jr giving his "I have a dream" speech in August of 1963.
"I am more pleased that I only write what I feel like and it has been lucrative since I got out of college in 1989. I had the great and unexpected success of Prozac Nation in 1994, and that bought me freedom. And I have spent that freedom carelessly, and with great gratitude. Why would I do anything else? I did not expect, not ever, to be scared to death," she wrote in 2012. "I was born with a mind that is compromised by preternatural unhappiness, and I might have died very young or done very little. Instead, I made a career out of my emotions."
