Elizabeth Wurtzel gave us all rules to live by

AUTHOR, JOURNALIST, Generation X poster girl and cultural force Elizabeth Wurtzel died last week at the age of 52, after a long battle with breast cancer.

Her debut 1994 memoir, Prozac Nation: Young And Depressed In America, about her struggles with heroin and cocaine as a Harvard undergraduate, rocketed her on to The New York Times best-seller list at 27. The book marked a new era of confessional writing and transparency about mental health, self-harm, casual sex and addiction that foreshadowed the confident tell-all style of social media today (as Elizabeth wrote later, ‘I was a hashtag before there was Twitter’).

Young, beautiful and outspoken, she divided audiences with her writing style; was she courageously candid or merely neurotically self-obsessed? The New York Times Book Review dubbed her ‘Sylvia Plath with the ego of Madonna’. Her follow-up book, Bitch: In Praise Of Difficult Women, was an answer to her critics, resonating with the late ’90s Riot Grrrl feminism.

But to truly understand Elizabeth Wurtzel there is only one book you need: the lesser-known The Bitch Rules, a 118-page feminist mini-manifesto. Published in 2000 and now out of print, its wit and wisdom still resonate two decades later. Now more than ever, revisiting Elizabeth’s ‘common sense advice for an uncommon life’ seems a fitting tribute. Here are some highlights...

Wear Levi’s 501s

See? Timely. ‘Men’s 501s blues with a button fly, slung low on your hips. Levi’s are about not trying too hard. You will always look cool in them.’

Don’t clear the table at a dinner party unless the men get up to help too

Of course, we all want to show our appreciation for the host but, as Elizabeth said, ‘Not if the men don’t. Clean-up tasks should not be gendered.’ I fully expect she stayed at the table, smoking cigars and having opinions and waiting for dessert. (As she recommended, ‘Eat your cheesecake with great relish, like you believe you deserve it.’)

Enjoy your single years

‘Do not think that the whole point of being single is getting married; men don’t think this way and neither should you.’ And as Elizabeth (who married for the first time at the age of 48) advised, ‘Don’t even think of getting married until you have become the fascinating, fabulous creature that you would want to spend the rest of your life with.’

Have a job, have your own money, support yourself

‘Girls who pay their own rent don’t have to be nice.’ Boom!

Have a cleaning person come in as often as you can afford

‘It is no virtue to do miserable tasks if you can pay someone else to.’

Always ask

Because, ‘The whole world is conspiring to keep you silent; do not be party to this cabal.’ And because, ‘Curious people are not always the happiest people, but they are never bored.’ Also, ‘If you don’t ask, you will never know… if you could have had that great job, or if that guy was available, or if Freud’s theories are more important than Marx’s.’

Do nothing

Nope, not #mindfulness. For Elizabeth, ‘doing nothing is a conscious decision to not accelerate the drama’. While she fully admitted to her own slip-ups in this area (‘I have spent my whole life driving people crazy’), it’s true that, ‘If you have avoided doing anything to fuck things up further, you will feel much, much better.’ Wisdom for both social media and IRL.

Be gorgeous

This may represent the perfect Venn diagram of Elizabeth’s chutzpah and self-deprecation: ‘I myself believe that I am about 10 times prettier than I actually am. By dint of sheer willpower, I have managed to convince many people of this.’ She also had the life-changing advice: ‘Do not, in any way, alter your hair colour yourself.’ Even when living with crackheads, she claimed she ‘still went to Madison Ave for highlights’.

Anything is possible

‘Go for it. And when it works out say, I knew it.’