Atypical version

• • Last time I checked the DSM — — it was filed under D.
• • But it seems there is a new improved version — — filed under A.
• • Authors used to write biographies about notable souls who were plagued with D. Poets penned verse, wrapping sly metaphors around personal bouts with D. Dorothy Parker (afflicted with it) once wrote that actress Katharine Hepburn's emotional range ran the gamut from A to B. Currently, memoirs about A are outselling bios about D.
• • For instance, Prozac Nation — — Young and Depressed in America: A Memoir [published in 1994] was written by Elizabeth Wurtzel. Her bestseller was adapted into an independent film of the same name. The title is a reference to Prozac, the name of an antidepressant (made by Eli Lilly and Co.) that was prescribed for Elizabeth Wurtzel.
• • Prozac Nation is also similar to Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted, a book published in the same year: both were written by attractive young women describing their experiences of mental illness, and both became motion pictures.
• • Atypical depression • •
• • Elizabeth Wurtzel's mental illness is known as atypical depression, which has not often been written about in the first person narrative. Clearly, her book proposal used that extraordinary distinction as a hook to separate her manuscript from more "typical" black-dog tell-alls such as The Bell Jar and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden [a manuscript that was originally published under a pen name because the author was ashamed to publicize her sorrow and have it define her].
• • It's very convenient when a prescription drug leads to a lucrative book contract and a movie deal.
• • The atypical author, no longer wearing quite as heavy dollops of black mascara and blue eyeliner, as she once used to when attending Manhattan literary readings, is still linking herself to anything black or blue that can be considered self-promotion — — such as the [recent] suicide of another bestselling literary light.
• • Radar Magazine — — a kind of frat boyish publication that is a cross between Mad Magazine and the late, great Spy — — sprinkled a bit of salt on this squib about Bad-to-Wurtzel.
• • Radar Magazine wrote this [below] — —
• • • • Elizabeth Wurtzel: Everything Sucks (P.S. I Knew David Foster Wallace)
• • • • If you've read any of Elizabeth Wurtzel's work — particularly Prozac Nation, her grating, self-indulgent screed about wanting to stick her head in the oven whilst an undergraduate at Harvard — you are well acquainted with the author's tremendous suffering.
• • • • Now, writing for New York magazine's Intelligencer, Wurtzel weighs in on the recent suicide of po-mo novelist David Foster Wallace. She knew him for a bit. And she hates to be all me-me-me about things, but this whole nasty business does remind her of her own terrible depression.
• • • • Here's Wurtzel on why she thought Wallace was a genius: "Maybe it was just the way he was so open and curious, or the way he was so taken with the silver lamé leotard I was wearing."
• • • • And here's her acting coy about the actual nature of their relationship: "I could not tell you exactly what went down, but it seems perfectly possible to me that by the time we stopped talking in a terrible huff, there were involved many editors, agents, publishers/lawyers, guns, money/therapists, hospitals, ambulances."
• • • • (This is how things always are for Wurtzel. Magical happenings defy description. Or, at least they defy the type of comprehensible descriptions that regular, semi-literate, non-manic, non-genius types like you and me could ever understand. See the "accidental blow-job" incident in Prozac Nation for more!) . . .
• • Okay, me again.
• • Stick a fork in it, honey, is what I will say the next time I run into her in a ladies room, cutting cocaine with the crisp edge of a Benjamin and wrinkling her silver lamé leotard as she crouches over the marble counter top. And, Yorick, that ain't no infinite jest.

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• • Born in Brooklyn, NY, Mae West came into the world on 17 August 1893.
• • Over 2 dozen individuals came up to see Mae on August 17th and celebrate with us in New York, NY!
• • Come up and see Mae West onstage — —
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