Bitch

by Elizabeth Wurtzel

  Wharton, Edith. The House of Mirth. New York: Bantam Books, 1984.

  Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. New York: Dell, 1960.

  Witchel, Alex. Girls Only: Sleepovers, Squabbles, Tuna Fish and Other Facts of Family. New York: Random House, 1996.

  Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. New York: William Morrow, 1991.

  ———. Fire with Fire: the New Female Power and How It Will Change the 21st Century. New York: Random House, 1993.

  ———. Promiscuities. New York: Random House, 1997.

  Wolfe, Linda. Double Life: The Shattering Affair Between Chief Judge Sol Wachtler and Socialite Joy Silverman. New York: Pocket Books, 1994.

  Wollstonecraft, Mary. Vindication of the Rights of Women. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988.

  Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1990.

  Wyden, Peter. Stella: One Woman’s True Tale of Evil, Betrayal, and Survival in Hitler’s Germany. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.

  Yeats, W. B., Richard J. Finneran, ed. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. New York: Scribner, 1996.

  Young, James. Nico: The End. Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press, 1993.

  Acknowledgments

  This book was written over the course of about a year, during which I lived in four different apartments, three hotels, one seamy residential motel and two different houses. When life becomes unstrung and peripatetic at a time when you are also working on something you care about more than anything else on earth—which is to say, in my case, this book—if you are lucky you will discover that love comes from surprising sources, that kindness and generosity can be the lingua franca and common currency of people all over the place.

  I must first thank my mother, who is relentlessly supportive of me even when she does not understand or like what I am doing. I lived in her apartment in Florida for a long while, and without the time and peace that haven provided me with, I could not have gotten this work done. For some reason, my mom is never quite able to see—or feel—how much I appreciate her, that I like her just fine as is, that if I had the opportunity I would not choose another mother—for some reason my mom has never quite understood that I love her so, different as we are, but I really do. Her generosity and bafflement and affection are written into the best and worst of everything I am.

  I must also thank my Florida relatives, who became the family I never had while I was camped out in their neighborhood. Lewis and Wandy Wang Druss and their awesomely adorable daughters Meredith and Samantha were kind enough to look after me, keep me company, and include me in all kinds of familial outings that I had only known about from watching Eight Is Enough and The Brady Bunch. Perhaps someday Skunky will become the dog they deserve. Sadly, we never made it to the state fair, or even the county fair, but maybe next time. Aunt Zena and Uncle Bill Druss are the coolest eighty-somethings I know of, and I will gladly eat the early bird special or visit Sawgrass Mills with them anytime. In fact, I will happily do just about anything with or for them anytime because they are such genuine gems.

  I never intended to establish any ties while down in Florida, but after some confusion about parking spaces, I ended up befriending my downstairs neighbor, Laura Breuer, while trying to apologize. As soon as I discovered that she had both a VCR and a cat to play with, I knew she was worth cultivating, and when she understood that I needed to cash a check so I could buy the Gucci horsehair slides that I had been coveting forever right that moment, I knew I was right. Eventually we became like Mary and Rhoda—which never happens in New York—and I came to adore her and count on her advice and patience and fun-lovingness, and when I left, I found myself missing her terribly. I must also thank Jim Bennett for suffering through tirades against the death penalty and rants against renting videos from the new release section, for helping me move (albeit in an un-air-conditioned truck) and being a pal.

  I owe much more than the usual authorial respect and gratitude and servitude to my Doubleday family—and after I basically lived in their offices for part of the autumn of my discontent, promising each day that the next day the manuscript would finally be done, I feel safe calling these long-forgiving souls “family.” Matt Ellis, assistant par excellence: let’s bury the hatchet over permissions, printing problems, and whatever other hassles I created for you during your first day, followed by your first week, followed by your first month, and soon to be your first year on the job—thank you awesomely and massively for all. I owe you dinner at Aquavit (Betsy will pay?). Laura Hodes: thank you for all your help early on, for always going out of your way, and for that most appropriate pillow. John Pitts: thank you for the wonderful job so far with the advance excerpt and your early-on enthusiasm for this project—and for teaching me how to use e-mail. Mario Pulice: thank you for making the book look so alarmingly amazing—and for the promise of pizza in Fort Lee anytime. David Vance: you are a photographer of such talent and skill that I fear—actually, I know—I will only disappoint anyone who sees your pictures before they meet me; thank you so much for doing such a wonderful job with the cover, and for, in spite of what I just said, managing to capture some essential piece of me in the images that you created. Special thanks go to Kathy Trager for saving me from the legal wrath of the women herein. Lawrence Krauser: thank you so very much for being there while I was looming at the Bertelsmann building late into the night, and thank you especially for having that extra bit of kindness that kept you waiting longer than you should have when I was more strung out than I could have explained; and for whatever part you had in the copy editing process—I appreciate that too. Harold Grabau: I don’t believe we’ve ever really met, and I’m sure the copy editing of this book was such a pain in the ass that you never want to meet me, but nevertheless, thanks for the bang-up job with a mess of a text; thanks also to Maureen Cullen, Bob Daniels, Mark Hurst, and Jack Lynch for working overtime and holidays to catch my sloppiness and errors before anyone else did. Alison Cherwin: consider this an early thank you for attending to nightmares yet to come and disasters yet to accumulate—and for doing a fantastic job. Janet Hill: thanks for conversation and Chinese food after I’d gone fifty hours without sleep on a Saturday afternoon, and thank you for hiring Mayuri Reddy, a woman with the good sense to have a physician boyfriend to call when I was strangled by a panic attack in the office next door. Harriet Rubin: I don’t know you, but I love your office, especially the daybed. Pat Mulcahy and Michael (“Pencils down!”) Palgon somehow got used to my addled presence in the office long past the point when it could possibly be justified—thank you for running such a warm and wonderful company that allowed me to work in my hopelessly inefficient way—I hope you will somehow forgive all the inconvenience I created. In the meantime, Jaguars all around. Finally, Arlene Friedman was brave and committed enough to this book to keep it on an accelerated track when there was scant evidence that I could deliver—and she understood that her confidence in this project would make me do the work. Besides being a great publisher, she’s also completely haimish. The belief Arlene and everyone at Doubleday has had in this project from the get-go has been, for me, a force of nature.

  Thank you to Maria Verheij, an extraordinary researcher, a true pal and an amazing aid for any household crisis—let’s just say that I’ll hold the nail if she’s doing the hammering. Maria is also a natural blonde whose command of the English language is far superior to that of most Americans. Her return to Holland was made bearable only by Emma Cobb, who unearthed some truly apocryphal material. There are many women whose secrets are not safe because Emma has discovered them.

  Thank you also to the publishers of the foreign editions of Prozac Nation who did so much to make my idiomatic Americanese comprehensible in the most exotic places. Like England, a country, as they say, separated from ours only by an ocean and a language: thanks to Stella Kane and all at Quartet for bridging that gap to the point where I feel at home in London. Maarten Asscher at J. M. Meulenh
off must be singled out for gallantry, Kajsa Leander and Ernst Malmsten at Leander Malmsten must be praised for their style and substance, and Sylvia Querini and Miguel Martinez-Lage at Ediciones B for, quite literally, thinking of everything (especially ways to avoid getting arrested in Madrid).

  How have I been blessed with such incredible friends? In the last couple of years, I have been so lucky to have people in my life whose loyalty was deeper and stronger than my ability to indulge in destructiveness and drama, or my insistence on withdrawing from life—or from the active duties that friendship demands—for more than just a little while. I am proud and humbled by the presence of these people in my life. Christine Fasano put aside her own misgivings about what I was doing to myself and was a friend in need and in deed: somewhere along the way, Christine made a leap of love and kindness that was much greater than I think either of us expected, and it was through her exertions that we both discovered how strong the bonds of friendship are in a world that is otherwise truly without pity—I mean, it is not just anyone who will stop in Fort Lauderdale for a day to check in on me en route to New York from Brazil. Jody Friedman looks like a Bond girl and writes scholarly papers on missile deployment and takes business trips to Zimbabwe and takes phone calls from Oscar Arias—and in all this glamour and genius, she still finds time for me. Jody and I together have watched a lot of strange and difficult things happen in the last few years, and I thank God every day that our relationship is intact, that we can still rent movies and get our highlights done together—and that things have worked out so much more happily in the end. Sharon Meers thought there was hope for me when there really was none—which is why eventually there was hope. Sharon has been my bedrock over the years: she is surely the only woman who has ever moved to San Francisco and met a straight man almost as soon as she deplaned, deciding to marry him within a matter of months. She also completed the New York City marathon and became a member of the Council on Foreign Relations in the same year; when I grow up, I want to be just like Sharon. Roberta Feldman: I hope you are swingingly single and making it safe for a market economy somewhere in Moscow or Lvov or Warsaw, but wherever you are, please know that your presence permeates this book. There are lessons I learned from Roberta freshman year that still ring true many years of maturity since. Mark McGurl wins huge points with me for driving four hours each way through Florida’s dull, flat terrain just to see what had happened to me. Jason Bagdade has been out of touch, but still, love never dies. Elizabeth Ackerman, Kera Bolonik, Tom Campbell, Amanda Filipacchi, Jonathan Glickman, Emily Jenkins, Steven Johnson, Jamie Linville, Peter Robles, Betsey Schmidt, Stefanie Syman—though I’ve been away and out of touch for quite a while, and though lifestyle changes and long hours have kept us more apart than I like, all of them should know that they mean a lot to me and I miss them much. I am grateful to Rachel Brodie and Naomi Shechter for remaining a part of who I am after all this time.

  Mare Winningham: what a gift it was to get to know you late at night by telephone, for all those months of girl talk and movie talk and music talk and book talk and just general cross-country gab. I am ready for my close up—in person, I hope. In the meantime, you should know that your friendship was a sustaining force while I was hiding in the swampland and trying to write. You are truly a woman of heart and mind.

  Great gratitude must be extended to Silver Hill and Wilton House. I especially thank Ellyn Shander, M.D., for being such a grandly innovative, daring, and eccentric therapist and Joanne Waters for patience and wisdom. Most of all I must thank Sue Carroll, Roberta Green and Gregory Blake at the Cottage for having far greater faith in me than I did in myself, for being forbearing with all my brattiness, and for showing untold kindness and caring when I really did not deserve it—and teaching me how to be a person who did. Residents at the Cottage—whose anonymity shall be respected—probably affected me and meant more to me than they’ll ever know or I’ll ever be able to say; I wish them all long life. On the home front, much appreciation to Paula Eagle, M.D., for enduring with such calm what must surely be a very frustrating task—I hope it will be easier from here on; I’m looking forward to it.

  I feel obligated to thank the entire hospitality industry—God bless whoever invented room service—but especially the staffs of the Riverside Hotel in Fort Lauderdale and the Millennium and Peninsula hotels in New York City. Caroline Kim, a housesitter of great reliability, allowed me to leave home and be accommodated at these places. Thanks to her for caring for Zap, my cat, who is such a fine and gentle creature that only someone as sweet and caring as Caroline would possibly do.

  How lucky I am to occupy the same planet as Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan. Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde—those albums, the voices they carried, reached me when nothing and no one else did. Without them I might still have been able to write this book, but without the small fix of God’s presence that I could hear in Springsteen and Dylan, I can’t imagine why I’d have bothered.

  Chris—what can I say? Thank you so much for being the sweet, adorable voice on the other end of the phone when I was a thousand miles away, thank you for every Nexus inquiry you ever ran for me, thank you for more information on Pamela Anderson than even Tommy Lee would care to know, thank you for your care and kindness, for the safety and sanity of your presence. To paraphrase a mutual favorite, when I was at my most impoverished, thank you for teaching me how to give. Most of all, thank you for reminding me. You drew seven circles around my soul. I think you already know I could not have done this without you.

  With regard to my editor, Betsy Lerner, and my agent, Lydia Wills, to whom this book is dedicated: to enumerate their contributions to this work and to my life would be an attempt to delimit what has been for me an unlimited wellspring of generosity, advice, insight, and (because I can think of no other word) love over the last few years. Suffice it to say that this book is as much theirs as it is mine, that their blood, sweat, and tears are in the ink of every page, that their contribution to everything that is here is such that, as Pablo Neruda wrote at the end of one of his odes, they have “lived half my life, and will die half my death.”

  In memoriam:

  Gunnar O’Neill 1968–1995

  Jeff Buckley 1966–1997

  Athan Alton 1968–1998

  Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth

  Ecclesiastes 11:9

  Permissions

  Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster from for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf by Ntozake Shange. Copyright © 1975, 1976, 1977 by Ntozake Shange.

  “I’m On Fire” by Bruce Springsteen. Copyright © by Bruce Springsteen. Reprinted by permission.

  “Beginning With O” by Olga Broumas. Copyright © 1977. Reprinted with permission of Yale University Press.

  “Handy Man” by Otis Blackwell and Jimmy Jones. Copyright © Warner Bros. Publications. Reprinted by permission.

  “Doll Parts” by Courtney Love. Copyright © Mother May I Music 1992. Reprinted by permission.

  “Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath. Copyright © 1982. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

  Excerpts from Selected Poems of Anne Sexton. Copyright © 1988 by Linda Gray Sexton, as Literary Executor of the Estate of Anne Sexton. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Previously published in Live Or Die (1966).

  “The Edge” by Sylvia Plath. Copyright © 1982. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

  “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath. Copyright © 1982. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

  Excerpts from The Journals of Sylvia Plath, Copyright © 1982 reprinted by permission of Doubleday.

  From The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke by Rainer Maria Rilke, edited & translated by Stephen Mitchell. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.

  “Marlene on the Wall” by Suzanne Vega. Copyright © 1985
Warner Bros. Publications. Reprinted by permission.

  “T’ Ain’t Nobody’s Business (If I Do)” words and music by Porter Grainger and Everett Robbins. Permission granted by MCA Music Publishing.

  “The Lovepet” by Ted Hughes. Copyright © 1982. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

  “Love Song” by Ted Hughes. Copyright © 1982. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

  “Brilliant Disguise” by Bruce Springsteen. Copyright © 1987 by Bruce Springsteen. Reprinted by permission.