Books
I don't want to be Elizabeth Wurtzel. OK, she's a cult figure, now with three published books. She wrote for The New Yorker, The Guardian and won the Rolling Stone award for college journalism. Her bestselling debut Prozac Nation is now a film starring the ever-cool Christina Ricci. Her second book Bitch explores the idea of female manipulation; linking Plath to Hilary Clinton, Delilah to Amy Fisher. On the cover of her works, she appears to be grungily sexy, all long blonde hair and tattoos. A product of her time, she writes with wit and style and a high level of self awareness. All her works are straight from the heart. And here is where my envy of her ends. Having written of her long battle with depression in Prozac Nation, the end of this autobiography seems to herald closure: a cathartic piece of writing which - once completed - signals that her problems are now over. But with the publication of More, Now, Again it appears she had us fooled. The success of Prozac Nation leads Wurtzel into a drug addiction involving snorting forty Ritalin tablets a day and it is this period of seeming unbelievable lows which she now documents.
The force of her narrative, an easy and amenable prose style takes us on a convincing descent into an impossible addiction. Wurtzel becomes a pathetic, self-obsessed nightmare, and we the readers are incensed when - after being in a successful rehab clinic she comes out and immediately scores cocaine.
I wonder why Wurtzel decides to bare her soul in this frustrating way. The naked truth of her situation paints a distinctly unflattering portrait of an otherwise vivacious and intelligent woman. Her friends and family are depicted in a similarly brutal way. She does not choose to fictionalise her flaws as in Plath's The Bell Jar, and this essential truth becomes unsettling. Though the book ends on a "clean" note as with Prozac Nation, there is also an abiding fear of relapse. Painful but compelling reading.
I apologise, but in order to write this review I am going to have to reveal rather a lot about the plot of this "memoir". This doesn't matter too much as it's not long before you realise the book isn't actually written by a hundred year old woman as it claims to be: for one thing the author's name on the cover is Bruno Maddox.
My Little Blue Dress is the memoir of an old woman conveniently born on the 1st of January 1900. The nameless memoirist lives an idyllic Laurie Lee-style childhood. It is not long, however, before you realise there is something rather odd about this memoir. She never quite manages to sound like an old woman writing about being a little girl. Why for example, does she like to talk about her own pert thirteen-year-old nipples? The reasons for this gradually become clear as a second voice appears. Gradually the story changes until the old woman doesn't have a voice of her own and is merely telling of the sad existence of a certain Bruno Maddox. Bruno is a wannabe literary type living in twenty-first century New York. He spends his days with similar potential authors sitting in cafés trying to write. He feels that his tragedy is that he was born too late and that all the good ideas have been taken. Eventually, through a strange chain of circumstances, he finds himself having to fake an entire old woman's memoirs in a single night in order to win back his girlfriend who has finally realised how pathetic he is.
The novel manages to cleverly poke fun at the memoir genre. It exposes the ignorance of young people to what happened in the last century. This is a difficult book to criticise as it generally does work well. The early memoirs in particular are very amusing yet Bruno himself becomes slightly more tiring as the novel progresses.
Still Waters is a memoir of Jennifer Lauck's adolescent years. Jennifer's sad childhood is expressed by the callous attitude of her stepmother: "It's called survival - figure it out". As far as her aunt and uncle - who she eventually lives with - are concerned, she is always guilty, always ungrateful, and potentially dangerous. A system of tough love is imposed to 'help' her. The catalyst that provokes her to realign herself is a meeting with her estranged brother Bryan. Lauck discovers that her family told Bryan that she claimed they had had sex as children, yet when Bryan commits suicide later, the family refuse to face their culpability, Jennifer realises that to resolve her problems, she must investigate the roots of her childhood.
While a great part of the novel uses great emotional hiatus, when Jennifer faces the secrets of her past the writing is much more sparse. Lauck correctly judges that the effect of the terrible events of Jennifer's life resonate beyond the understated tone. Unfortunately, as the self-sufficient emotionally-suppressed Jennifer discovers the truth of her past, the reader finds themselves faced with a different Jennifer, an emotionally-charged fatalist. The reader is satisfied to a degree by the plot resolution which comes through Jennifer's self-discovery, but the reference to the possibility of writing the story as the final stage of her therapy can't help but locate the novel in the realm of the trashy. Still Waters is well-written, and captures the attention: but as a character, Jennifer Lauck was much more interesting when she was messed-up.
21st Feb 2002