Literary Rogues (27 page)

Where does the author end and his characters begin? The question has been a recurring theme in Ellis's career. Asked by a reporter if he ever has “Bret Easton Ellis” moments straight out of his books (sex, drugs, partying), Ellis said, “
I was staying in the nicest hotel
in London [on a book tour in 2010], and it was already feeling very ‘Bret Easton Ellis.' Then we went to this private club and drugs started appearing,” he said. “We took the party back to my hotel room, where people started to act a bit depraved. And people started to have sex on my couch in front of me, and there were blow lines out in places. At six in the morning I just threw them all out because I finally needed to go to sleep.” He stressed that most nights he leads a simpler life. As far as vices go, Ellis has said that his only poison these days is a really good tequila.

Ellis, now in his forties, has moved back to L.A., where he works primarily as a television and movie screenwriter. “
I had a really good run in New York
,” he told
Interview
magazine. He worries about his drinking sometimes, but not enough do anything about it. He did follow someone to an AA meeting once—for sex, not sobriety. He has made oblique references to drugs in interviews and on social media platforms but insists that he is
“not interested” in drugs
any longer. “
The party ends at a certain point
,” he has said.

Ellis's toxic twin, McInerney, has also struggled to distance himself from his own party boy image. “I don't necessarily want to be
the symbol of hard, fast living
. It's part of what I'm still up against—the very powerful stereotype that's developed around me as a result of that first book. I think it's confusing for some people to think of me writing about something else. But that's what I have to do. I have to grow and change and develop. And I have to convince my readers to come along with me.” Still, McInerney acknowledges that, without his original persona, his continued success wouldn't be possible. “
If I hadn't written
Bright Lights
, I'd probably be teaching freshmen English in Kansas right now.”

McInerney has always seemed to have a keen sense of self-awareness. In a 1986 interview, he worried out loud about the fate of writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald who were identified with boom times. When cocaine and clubbing became passé, would McInerney take the fall? “If being
a spokesman for a generation
is a fleeting occupation, being a symbol of an era is downright dangerous for anyone who has the bad luck to outlive it,” McInerney wrote.

But McInerney didn't retreat into a shell of a man like Fitzgerald. Instead, McInerney—whose only vices these days are “
wine and sex
”—has continued to write and publish, stunning critics with his longevity.
Time
magazine has called him the “
Dick Clark of literature
” for his seeming perennial youth and ability to hit the clubs and make headlines well into his fifties.

“
The shortness of life
makes everything seem pointless when I think about the longness of death.”

—
ELIZABETH WURTZEL

L
ike Bret Easton Ellis,
Elizabeth Wurtzel
(b. 1967) is a member of Generation X, the American generation that started to come of age in the 1980s. The decade went by without any significant youth revolution. “
I think there is no rebellion
, not because kids are stupid or slothful, but because the dark side of America is now in charge,” Hunter S. Thompson said.

“
We were always in the shadow of
the baby boomers,” Wurtzel says. “Reagan had lowered the tax rate forty points and being rich became a great thing all of a sudden. No one cared about young people in the eighties, because they were too busy with themselves. We were uniquely fucked up. We grew up under divorce. Even people whose parents weren't divorced grew up around people who were. Homes were unstable.”

Youth movements had once been identifiable by literary movements (the Beats, the Lost Generation, the Decadents). Starting with the hippies in the United States in the 1960s, however, writers' influence in popular culture had been on the decline. By the 1980s, Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis were just two writers fighting against a flood of entertainment unleashed by cable television and MTV. When Generation X finally came of age, it was thanks to a rock band. “
When Nirvana started selling records
, people finally knew about us,” Wurtzel says. “I remember watching Nirvana on
Saturday Night Live
in 1991 with my mother, and there's this guy who's a brutal example of what happens, of what Reagan did to us. I said, ‘Oh my God, Mom, we won.' There's something poignant about him singing, ‘Here we are now, entertain us.' ” Nirvana and the “grunge music” revolution knocked bands like Poison and Warrant off the top of the charts. After twelve years of Reagan-Bush economic deregulation, people had enough and elected southern Democrat Bill Clinton to the White House in 1992. It was the dawn of a new era.

As a music journalist, Wurtzel was well positioned to be a spokesperson for Generation X. She had been racking up bylines and accolades since she was a teenager. By the time she turned seventeen, she had already been published in
Seventeen
magazine. She wrote for the
Harvard Crimson
while studying for her undergraduate degree in the mid-1980s, which earned her a Rolling Stone Magazine College Journalism Award in 1986. She also wrote for the
Dallas Morning News
and
The New Yorker
before she was out of college. Unfortunately, she was also battling a terrible depression that had been plaguing her since she was twelve or thirteen.

“
There is a classic moment
in Hemingway's
The Sun Also Rises
when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt, and all he can say in response is, ‘Gradually and then suddenly.' When someone asks how I lost my mind, that's all I can say too,” Wurtzel wrote.

Wurtzel's mental health improved with antidepressants—and years of therapy. She turned her ongoing battle with depression into
Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America
(working title: “I Hate Myself and Want to Die”). It was an instant bestseller in 1994. “
Love it or hate it
, people are freaking out over
Prozac Nation
,”
Vice
magazine wrote. “Fans claim the book is an extremely detailed and realistic depiction of what it's like to suffer from depression and that it should be required reading for psychiatric professionals and anyone who has ever battled with the disease or had antidepressants prescribed to them.” Critics panned the work as the insufferable diary of a “
neurotic, smart, sexy, rich
, self-obsessed Jewish girl.”

Wurtzel, who appeared in portrait on the front of her book jacket, became a face for the dark side of Generation X—for the products of broken homes and twelve years of trickle-down economics. Millions of young people were being prescribed antidepressants. While it's unfair to lay the blame at politicians' or parents' feet for a nation of depressed and agitated youth (such an accusation ignores the genetic component of mental health disorders), something was clearly in the air.

As we've seen in many of the preceding chapters, though, Wurtzel wasn't the first writer to turn to legal psychiatric drugs to find her way back to sanity. Overall, writers and artists have been wary of taking mood-altering legal drugs for fear of affecting their creativity. The irony, of course, is that many of them have thought nothing of snorting cocaine or smoking a joint. “
The question of whether
the ‘real you' is the person on lithium or the person on illegal drugs doesn't matter,” Wurtzel says. “What matters is whether you function or not. We don't know that the medication isn't helping you become the real you. There's only a control group of one for any of us. Whatever the ‘real you' is, we don't know the answer. We never will. It's an impossible question.”

After the success of
Prozac Nation
, Wurtzel received a $500,000 advance for her next project,
Bitch
, a defense of “difficult women” such as Amy Fisher and Monica Lewinsky. She quickly ran into trouble: Ritalin and cocaine. Wurtzel checked in and out of rehab, but couldn't shake her addictions. She relapsed and finally moved into the offices of her publisher, Doubleday, to finish the book.

In her second memoir,
More, Now, Again
, she chronicled her time at their New York offices, doing coke and sleeping in an office that they provided her. “
I don't know why they didn't care
more about my drug use,” she tells me. “It was such a crazy situation. They didn't know what to do with me. You have an author who's coming in and just taking over. My editor, Betsy Lerner, didn't know what to do with me.” Eventually, her publisher told her, “Pencils down, Liz.” That was the end of the book, and she left their offices and decided to return to rehab.

Before Wurtzel checked in to the hospital, she telephoned her friend and fellow addict, Rob Bingham. Bingham was an author whose debut short story collection had just been published by Doubleday. He was well-known for throwing launch parties for his literary journal
Open City
at his Tribeca loft, where drugs and alcohol were always in plentiful supply. Wurtzel recalled shooting smack with Bingham once underneath his pool table while other guests snorted coke off the pages of the
Paris Review
. “
No one ever had the sense
to separate the truly desperate from the merely decadent,” Wurtzel later wrote. “We were all doing too many drugs together at the same time, the people who could handle it with the people who were going to end up dead and worse, and we were too young to see where all this was going to lead.” Wurtzel told Bingham that he was the best fiction writer of their generation, and that she couldn't wait to read the debut novel that he was working on.

“
Every recovered addict
I have ever met knows his sobriety date and knows how many years he has been straight. Every addict can remember when enough was finally enough, when something had to give,” Wurtzel wrote in
More, Now, Again
. “I will never forget October 10, 1998. I will never forget the last time I used.” After she successfully completed her rehab program, her publisher presented her with a framed pencil with the phrase “Pencils Down.” It now hangs in her kitchen, a constant reminder of her battle with cocaine and Ritalin addiction and the toll it took on her writing.

Bitch
was savaged by critics. The
New York Times Book Review
said it was “
full of enormous contradictions
, bizarre digressions and illogical outbursts,” though it was “honest, insightful, and witty.” In other words, the book was much like its author.

Bingham died of a heroin overdose on Thanksgiving weekend in 1999—five months before the publication of his first (and only) novel. His death still affects Wurtzel. “
When somebody close to you
kills themselves, there is blood on your hands,” she says. “I don't understand how you say, ‘There's nothing you could have done.' ” She makes it clear that she's not accusing anyone. “It gets tiring to deal with people who are chronically depressed,” she admits.

Wurtzel appeared nude on the cover of
Bitch
, flipping the bird to the reader. “
I don't remember whose idea it was
,” she says. “The art director had the idea for the particular way it looked. The book isn't about me, but it's using other people's stories to answer a question I had about how to live.” Surprisingly, the cover elicited little reaction at the time, suggesting just how far American culture had come since the days of outrage over Truman Capote's infamous “seductive” author photo on the jacket of
Other Voices, Other Rooms
.

A pair of framed photos from the
Bitch
shoot is hung on the wall of her guest room. When I question whether this is an appropriate place to exhibit nude photos of oneself, Wurtzel shrugs. “
It just seemed too narcissistic
to put them in the living room,” she says.

Wurtzel has come under fire from critics for her “
rampant egotism
.” One critic complained that Wurtzel's chronicles of addiction simply aren't disastrous enough. “
Her narcissism is so deep-seated
she believes that because it's she, Elizabeth Wurtzel, doing these things, they can't help but be fascinating to the general reader,” Toby Young wrote. Other critics have been even more unforgiving. “
Sorry, Elizabeth
. Wake up dead next time and you might have a book on your hands,”
Salon
's Peter Kurth wrote.

The criticism was nothing new. Similar charges have been leveled at memoirists for hundreds of years. According to one negative review of
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
, for instance, the most shameful part of De Quincey's memoir wasn't his laudanum usage, but his “
habit of diseased introspection
.” Nevertheless, Wurtzel took some time off from her “diseased introspection” to attend Yale Law School in the early 2000s.