I Ask Myself
Unsere Kolumnistin hatte eine wunderbare Arbeitsbeziehung mit einer bekannten Schriftstellerin – die leider viel zu früh endete.
Amy Argetsinger on her work relations with a famous author
Three years ago, I was editing an essay that Elizabeth Wurtzel had written for The Washington Post about the controversial TV series Girls. While her story was smart and witty, I found that it was missing something. So, I gently suggested: Didn’t she want to compare the show’s description of irresponsible young women in New York with memories of her own life in the 1990s?
She agreed to rewrite it that way, but sighed: She had sort of hoped not to make it about herself this time. It may have been the only time she said that. Elizabeth was famous for writing about herself — ever since she had published Prozac Nation, her shocking 1994 memoir of struggling with mental illness as a teenager. She followed it up with a book about her drug addiction, and went on to write plenty more, about her tortured romantic life, her troubled relationship with her parents, her battle with breast cancer, and her fears about aging.
Many critics found her self-indulgent and egocentric. She was a nobody — and only 26 years old when she wrote a memoir. Who does that? Well, after Elizabeth Wurtzel did it, a lot of other people followed suit. She started a craze for brutal, confessional memoirs by non-famous people.
I was surprised to become friends with this now famous writer, but she quickly became one of my closest correspondents. I realized later that she had a voracious need for conversation. She probably had ten other women with whom she constantly phoned, texted, or e-mailed — none of us quite aware that we were taking turns. I sometimes wondered if conversation was her new addiction, the habit she took up to replace drugs. But when I reread some of her text messages, I had to laugh at her brilliance and humor, and understood that this was part of the process she needed to go through as a writer. She was testing lines on me as we talked about our lives, and some of these lines would end up in her next story about her life. Maybe writing was her real addiction.
Last summer, she wanted to write about her divorce. She showed me her essay, but the writing was not as sharp as usual, no doubt because she was still in the middle of breaking up with her husband. A couple of weeks later, she sent me another draft, which was much better — because she’d had more time to think about it. So, I encouraged her: Keep writing every week, and in a year, after she had worked through her sorrow, she would have something brilliant to say about it.
Six months later, Elizabeth died, at the age of 52, after a very short battle with brain cancer. Another editor friend published the unfinished essay. It was good, but I miss the story it could have been if Elizabeth had had another six months to write it. But most of all, it’s her I miss.