Bellafante writes: "A few years ago I got an email from Elizabeth Wurtzel telling me that her cancer had returned, and that it was advanced. Saying I was sorry would render precisely the wrong response, she let me know. Her illness didn't scare her."
Elizabeth Wurtzel in 2000. (photo: Neville Elder/Corbis/Getty Images)
12 January 20
“Prozac Nation” seemed to herald a boundless future for young creatives. It was actually the beginning of the end.
few years ago I got an email from Elizabeth Wurtzel telling me that her cancer had returned, and that it was advanced. Saying I was sorry would render precisely the wrong response, she let me know. Her illness didn’t scare her.
“I kind of like it,’’ she wrote. “I have been the most impossible person my whole life, and now I no longer have to make excuses. Now I’m just like, ‘I have cancer.’ And people are like, ‘By all means, ruin our lives. Wreck the house.’”
She was in touch to talk specifically about someone who seemed unwilling to hand her a sledgehammer. She had been living in an apartment in downtown Manhattan for a while, and now, she said, her landlord wanted her out.
