Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel Page A

to know what to do with me, though I’m just enough of a mess to be driving everyone around me crazy.
    I cry some more and go on and on about how nice it must be to have someone so in love with you they’d sing about the day you died. Paris opens her mouth, probably to say something about how people would like to help, people would like to let me know they care, they just don’t know what to do, but I shut her up. I don’t want to hear the company line right now. And if anyone ever loved me enough to write such a beautiful song about me, you know I wouldn’t kill myself, I continue. In the end I have to think the girl in “For You” is totally crazy because she decided to die when there was so much love for her right here on earth.
    Yes, Paris says, talking to me only to offer the comfort of a human voice, not because she can say anything that will make a difference. I see what you mean.
    Oh, Paris. I cry some more. No one is ever going to love me that way because I’m so awful and all I ever do is cry and get depressed.
    If I were another person, I go on, I wouldn’t want to deal with me. I
don’t
want to deal with me. It’s so hopeless. I want out of this life. I really do. I keep thinking that if I could just get a grip on myself, I could be all right again. I keep thinking that I’m driving myself crazy, but I swear, I swear to God, I have no control. It’s so awful. It’s like demons have taken over my mind. And nobody believes me. Everybody thinks I could be better if I wanted to. But I can’t be the old Lizzy anymore. I can’t be myself anymore. I mean, actually, I am being myself right now and it’s so horrible.
    Paris just puts her arms around me and hugs me. Lizzy, everyone likes you fine just the way you are, she says, because that’s what people say in these situations.
    I sit there with my face in my hands as if to catch my head, to keep it from falling off and rolling across girls’ campus like a soccer ball that someone might kick by accident.

3
Love Kills
When I think of all the things he did because he loved me—what people visit on each other out of something like love. It’s enough for all the world’s woe. You don’t even need hate to have a perfectly miserable time.
    Â 
RICHARD BAUSCH
Mr. Field’s Daughter
    Â 
    By the time I made it to eighth grade, my parents were ready to kill each other. For the first time since their divorce, they had to talk pretty regularly about what to do with me. These were hopeless and frustrating discussions, no doubt, because every little thing always seemed to make me worse. I was like an already overspiced stew, and all the chefs adding all their condiments were only making it more foggy and muddled and bad.
    And my parents were a disastrous pairing for getting anything much accomplished. Here were two people who had barely spoken for ten years, just passing each other in the vestibule as they passed me back and forth between them, and now they were suddenly in constant contact, mostly yelling and fighting violently on the phone late at night. I would hear my mother’s voice as I lay, not sleeping, not even trying to sleep, in my bedroom. And sometimes, when I was deep in a slumber, the sound of them shouting in the other room would invade my dreams like a foreign army. My mother’s end turned up loud and clear while my father’s side was left to the vivid realm of imagination. They argued about whether Dr. Isaac was right for me, about who would pay for what, and, above all, whose fault it was that I was so messed up. They unearthed old controversies, and it was clear that if their problems had ever been buried, it was a very shallow and degraded grave. The pettiness was horrific: My father would complain that when I needed braces my mother managed to pick the most expensive, crooked, shyster of an orthodontist; my mother retorted that his insurance covered ninety