Wurtzel is referring to the baseball prodigy Robert Redford plays in the 1984 film The Natural, but she’s also talking about herself, her perceived failure to live up to expectations, the burden she feels as a Young Woman Of Promise who keeps letting people down because of her mental illness. And all I can say, over and over again, is that he’s a natural, he’s a natural, it’s such a gift to be a natural, it is such a responsibility, it is so hard to be natural,” Wurtzel writes, and we are right there with her at the Times Square Sbarro with its red neon lights and greasy veneer, feeling desperate. “The tears pour down after the movie as I eat dinner with my mother at a Sbarro in Times Square on Friday evening, and she demands to know what I am so upset about. I read Prozac Nation in one sitting and felt something like cathartic salvation. Who was this woman on the cover? She looked so cool, her gaze both empty and knowing. I remember standing in a New Jersey Barnes & Noble, tenderly taking the book from the shelf, and turning it over in my hands. IF YOU WERE a depressed young woman in the 1990s, Elizabeth Wurtzel’s memoir Prozac Nation (1994) was required reading.
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