Book review: Prozac Nation
A page in the diary "Accept, Adapt and Appreciate: How?"
Written by nw4m Jan 2 2008 12:31 PM
This is the author's memoir about her struggles with depression. The author is Elizabeth Wurtzel. Apparently this book has been made into a flim of the same name.
And as an important note, it's for adults, not young children. So young children should not be reading this book without proper adult guidance.
I have not finished reading the book, but I have just come across a passage from the book (Chp 3, Love Kills) which I would like to share with you here:
Can divorce possibly work when a child is involved?
I know that these days a small industry of marriage counselors and divorce therapists devote themselves to easing the process of parental separation for the sake of the children, and I know that all these people are just trying to help, trying to arrange things so that as long as we're stuck in Alaska we might as well have a good warm coat to wear. But can this situation ever really be all right?
Any breakup, even of a brief romance, is rife with potential for all kinds of emotional rampages. So how can we possibly be so pragmatic and realistic and eerily, creepily sane as to ask a couple going through a divorce to try to check their feelings and behave themselves and cooperate and be nice for the sake of the children?
Of all the odd demands that modern life makes on humanity, the most difficult may be not only insistence that we comfortably spend our adult lives going from one situation of serial monogamy to another, but its expectation that we get along, maintain friendships, share parental duties, and in some cases attend the second and third weddings of our exes. It asks that we pretend that heartbreak is a minor inconvenience that can be overcome with just the right amount of psycholanguage, with just a few repetitions of the mantra for the sake of the children.
I occasionally find myself respecting my parents for making no show of such civility, of not even staging amicability for my sake at worst moments. I know it would have been better for me had they managed to do that, but I might have been just as distressed by the hypocrisy, the false smiles, the feigned friendliness.
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I understand that not everyone can relate to what the book says as the the author is writing from the perspective of an American with Jewish roots.
However, her vivid descriptions or confessions about her feelings involved when dealing with depression and life, does appeal to me.
This is what the author said in her afterword:
'When I finally have to explain my motives for writing this book, it really does come down to wanting to feel less lonely in this lonely feeling, wanting to shed depression's thick, tender, suffocating skin.
I wanted to open up and say, This may not matter to anyone else, but as far as I'm concerned, at times it has felt like I've had Vietnam going on in my own brain.
And I really hoped to reach other people and touch a little bit of their loneliness.'
'..And I especially wanted to write Prozac Nation for young people. Perhaps it is presumptuous of me to hope that it might give them something to read in their depressive hours that I simply did not have, but I do.
And maybe - and this is a really optimistic maybe - somewhere along the way this dour story might give some people, some inspiration and even some hope for a better future, for the future that people my age and younger can look forward to building.'