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LITERARY LEGEND Elizabeth Wurtzel shot to the heights of fame with her shocking memoir "Prozac Nation" and recently resurfaced with her harrowing tale of Ritalin addiction in "More, Now, Again." Now, in this retrospective from the future, we look back on a life lived in letters, and on lots of drugs.

The Claritin Mystique

Precocious literary light Elizabeth Wurtzel emerged triumphant from her battles with Prozac and Ritalin, but her struggles were far from over. Now, in this raw, unflinching memoir, she shares the pain and desperation of her unquenchable thirst for seasonal allergy relief. Alone and with nowhere to turn, she asked her doctor about nondrowsy Claritin Reditabs, the popular allergy drug with high efficacy and a low occurrence of side effects. The drug worked well, too well. Now she tells, for the first time, how she frolicked in the park, free from sneezing and grogginess, playing with kittens and making new friends. Through her witty, insouciant prose, Ms. Wurtzel offers a candid look at our national obsession with minor pain relief and a pharmaceutical-industrial juggernaut that continues making scientific breakthroughs to improve the lives of millions of Americans everyday. By turns heartbreaking and comical, this book is a bible for anyone who's ever suffered from seasonal allergies.



Ditropan Highway

In her trademark luminescent prose, literary "it" girl Elizabeth Wurtzel lays bare her secret shame: that years of drug abuse left her with an acute case of overactive bladder and urge incontinence. Through Ditropan XL, an orally administered, antispasmodic agent indicated for the treatment of urinary urgency and frequency, she finds peace and undertakes a spiritual pilgrimage across America with Mr. Jingles, her loyal scotch terrier. But her newfound contentment evaporates somewhere around Kansas, where the increasing distance between towns and properly maintained restrooms fuels her urge incontinence, driving her into an ever-deepening spiral of addiction. Ms. Wurtzel takes her readers on a wrenching rollercoaster ride, from the heights of literary fame to the depths of a three-day binge on a toilet in Boulder, Colorado. There, high atop the Continental Divide, she wrestles with the demons of her addiction—dry mouth, achy fever and mild headache—and finds the road to redemption, relapse, redemption, and relapse once again. By turns epic and profound, this explosive memoir will rock the worldview of anyone who's ever driven cross country, with a dog, while having to urinate very badly.



OxyContin, Mon Amour

Elizabeth Wurtzel, the acclaimed belle du jour des lettres, emerges phoenix-like from her stretch of hard time with this ethereal homage to Marguerite Duras' timeless classic. Proudly flexing her prison tatts on the book's three-dimensional back cover, Ms Wurtzel tells how she brought her consuming addiction to the world of staged performance art, snorting ground-up OxyContin horse pills in a camouflage bikini while doing calisthenics with Maureen Dowd and Lenny Kravitz. But when the show tanks, she is consumed by the drug and begins sleeping in her car in front of pain clinics in order to get better parking. Alone, scared and staring at rock bottom, she checks herself into a homeopathic wellness retreat on the advice of Mr. Jingles, her loyal scotch terrier, to whom she has mistakenly ascribed the powers of speech. By turns lucid and flaccid, this book is like a Bob Dylan song sung by Gloria Steinem, with the Symbionese Liberation Army on keyboards.



Feed the Monkey: A Life in Pharmaceuticals

In this posthumous memoir, deftly woven from her lost diaries, literary comet Elizabeth Wurtzel gives her readers a longing look at the lingering light of her lasting luminescence, painting a vivid portrait of her own decline and fall. Broke, abandoned by her public and unable to find a doctor willing to write her a prescription, she sells herself to the Schering-Plough pharmaceutical corporation to be used as a laboratory test animal, provided that she retain the print, film and broadcast rights to her lab results and be let out of her cage from time to time to appear on "Politically Incorrect." But what begins as an audacious experiment in gonzo feminism ends only six days later when she is bludgeoned to death by Harold, a deranged howler monkey, after trying to steal Harold's experimental sunscreen. In "Feed the Monkey," Ms. Wurtzel could not have left a more fitting tribute to her literary legacy. By turns tragic and tragic, this book is a tragedy.


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