Fredrik deBoer is a writer and academic. His writing has appeared in
The New York Times,
The Los Angeles Times,
The Washington Post,
The Boston Globe,
Playboy, and
Harper’s among many others. His nonfiction books include
The Cult of Smart (2020) and
How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement (2023). He holds a PhD in English with a concentration in writing assessment and higher education policy from Purdue University.
The writer's new novel is
The Mind Reels.
At Electric Lit deBoer tagged ten books
that make a noble attempt at negotiating the gap between interior illness and exterior narrative. They don’t sanitize the disorientation, the self-doubt, the breakdowns that follow breakdowns; they resist turning mental illness into a metaphor or exotic spectacle.
One title on the list:
Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America by Elizabeth Wurtzel
Few memoirs have ever been more willing to make the memoirist look unsympathetic than Prozac Nation; three decades after its release, the book’s critics 
still don’t understand its self-awareness. A raw memoir of depression lived in excess—an excess of shame, despair, and spectacularly fractured ambition. Wurtzel writes of growing up bright, sensitive, full of promise, then gradually being undone by an illness that induces acute panic, long stretches of exhaustion, and humiliations she feels she can’t escape. Wurtzel’s language is blistering, grandiose, and often unbearably earnest. Long passages feel (and are) performative, as critics have charged, but with a purpose: Wurtzel understood that depression makes you pretentious, selfish, and myopic—and that the most unlovable parts of her are the parts she must learn to live with. Prozac Nation doesn’t offer tidy lessons, only a voice that says, this is what it was like. In that willingness to be ugly, the book is an act of great bravery.
Read about
the other entries on the list at Electric Lit.
Writers Read: Elizabeth Wurtzel (June 2008).
--Marshal Zeringue
Harper’s among many others. His nonfiction books include The Cult of Smart (2020) and How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement (2023). He holds a PhD in English with a concentration in writing assessment and higher education policy from Purdue University.
