i think what's interesting is that wurtzel is in freakin' law school. a very talented writer/critic went back to law school? at age 38 or 39? what gives?

Her books are so tedious and self-absorbed. She'll be perfect in BIGLAW.

If the Shane Chase post was interesting, Elizabeth Wurtzel is twice as interesting. At least she is really a LS.

a google image search reveals better pictures

4:22, obviously you've never read "Prozac Nation." Or you are not familiar with Wurtzel's colorful life, including some serious drug problems, or some of the things she has said (e.g., about 9/11).

I shouldn't have turned them down, I wanted to bang her when I was 16. It would be like a fantasy come true to be able to stare every day.

Why is this a story? Well, I'll ask this - -who's the genius that decided to hire some woman that's publicly battled depression and chose to go back to law school at 40 after a very successful writing career? These are indicators of only good things, right?

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/06.25.98/gifs/lit-wurtzel-9825.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/06.25.98/lit-wurtzel-9825.html&h=300&w=196&sz=14&hl=en&start=9&um=1&tbnid=Y7GIvjt-PJrv6M:&tbnh=116&tbnw=76&prev=/images%3Fq%3D%2BElizabeth%2BWurtzel%26svnum%3D10%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26rls%3Dcom.microsoft:en-us
________________________________________
Elizabeth Wurtzel strips for action
By Traci Hukill
IF ELIZABETH WURTZEL'S luck holds, this year's $64-million pop-culture question will be, Is the cover of Bitch, the young author's feminist follow-up to Prozac Nation, ironic or a witless attempt at sass? Assuredly it's a marketing coup. Wurtzel's svelte, naked babehood (with nipple Photoshopped out), the manicured hand that lazily flips the reader off and the bored sneer on her delicate face have won this book the distinction of a waiting list at the Metro office.
But how those features relate to a philosophy separate from Katie Roiphe's and Naomi Wolf's "do me" style of seduction-as-power-grab feminism remains unclear, muddled by Wurtzel's intellectual confusion and hyperventilating prose. Wurtzel aptly notes that feminism has failed us, or at least got us stuck between an ideological rock and a desirable hard place, but this book's frustrated rants, uncertain message and simpering conclusion don't help to point the way free.
Wurtzel's capable enough. She's smart, observant, educated and adept with language. But she's grappling with a complex problem--how women can get their emotional needs met without bringing on themselves the wrath of God, the media, men and other women--armed with a myopic strategy, namely one too focused on a coterie of starlets and professional brats.
The introduction, "Manufacturing Fascination" (a possible clue to the cover's inspiration), concludes with the thesis statement: "This is a book about women who wrote and write their own operating manuals, written in the hope that the world may someday be a safer place for them, or for us, for all women."
What follows is a who's who of history's bad girls--Delilah, Amy Fisher, Anne Sexton, Courtney Love--their apologies penned by Wurtzel herself, interspersed with stories of victims no less famous than Sylvia Plath, Princess Di and Nicole Brown.
Most are excused for their mistakes, tantrums and marriages and are molded into examples of how the world punishes "brilliant creatures who shine." The exception is Hillary Clinton, whom Wurtzel lambastes for not demanding a salary and for ignoring Bill's indiscretions; strangely, however, Wurtzel simultaneously praises the First Lady for having "succeeded [at marriage] where so many others have failed or given up or snapped." Others--Paula Jones and Pamela Harriman most notably--Wurtzel shreds, and her litmus test for who merits exoneration and who deserves public humiliation defies analysis.
ODDER STILL is the way Wurtzel, as if dipping into one of her exhaustively chronicled black moods, occasionally fires withering criticism at her subjects for no good reason. For her presumably sympathetic treatment of depressive women to include a sentence like "Margeaux Hemingway seems to have spent the last 20 years thinking that she should have been able to do something with herself because she was beautiful, when in truth, on the evidence, she was capable of absolutely nothing" undermines Wurtzel's humanity, maturity and coherence. Here is cattiness couched in a 400-page attack on sexist nastiness. Go figure.
If Wurtzel's logic suffers unnerving swings, her manic writing should be committed. Pretentious and obfuscating allusions to history and popular culture, parallel-structure sentences that ramble on for most of a page, too many personal confessions and a bad habit of prefacing her opinions with the word "look" (as in "Look, I think many people have rescued themselves from this game") bespeak the mistaken notion that people are privileged to read her self-absorbed, stream-of-consciousness meander through difficult intellectual territory. It's like having a precocious 13-year-old at the dinner table; she may be clever, she may even be right, but her constant need to interject herself impedes the conversation's progress.
And that may be the book's biggest flaw--that Wurtzel is annoying. In spite of her mastery of pop-culture history and her inability to shrink from the truth about where feminism has left women, her voice sounds too young and unseasoned to trust. Even the litany of her naughty escapades--screwing an Italian tattoo artist, snorting heroin, screwing a man twice her age, snorting coke--smacks of smugness, not depth and wealth of experience and sorrow of the sort that makes people speak quietly and honestly.
In the final chapter, she weaves toward a glimmer of humanitarianism in the statement "and [forgiveness over vengeance] has to be the guiding principle, it is the only chance any of us has for happiness." But that's a half page from the end, and the rest of the chapter consists of Wurtzel dissolving into despair that she'll be old and unmarried--or else that outcome would be fine with her (she says both). Ultimately, the forgiveness shtick just seems like so much theater.
When she's disciplined and experienced, Wurtzel will be a force to reckon with. Until then, readers will need patience and occasionally the help of a good dictionary.

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/06.25.98/gifs/lit-wurtzel-9825.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/06.25.98/lit-wurtzel-9825.html&h=300&w=196&sz=14&hl=en&start=9&um=1&tbnid=Y7GIvjt-PJrv6M:&tbnh=116&tbnw=76&prev=/images%3Fq%3D%2BElizabeth%2BWurtzel%26svnum%3D10%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26rls%3Dcom.microsoft:en-us
________________________________________
Elizabeth Wurtzel strips for action
By Traci Hukill
IF ELIZABETH WURTZEL'S luck holds, this year's $64-million pop-culture question will be, Is the cover of Bitch, the young author's feminist follow-up to Prozac Nation, ironic or a witless attempt at sass? Assuredly it's a marketing coup. Wurtzel's svelte, naked babehood (with nipple Photoshopped out), the manicured hand that lazily flips the reader off and the bored sneer on her delicate face have won this book the distinction of a waiting list at the Metro office.
But how those features relate to a philosophy separate from Katie Roiphe's and Naomi Wolf's "do me" style of seduction-as-power-grab feminism remains unclear, muddled by Wurtzel's intellectual confusion and hyperventilating prose. Wurtzel aptly notes that feminism has failed us, or at least got us stuck between an ideological rock and a desirable hard place, but this book's frustrated rants, uncertain message and simpering conclusion don't help to point the way free.
Wurtzel's capable enough. She's smart, observant, educated and adept with language. But she's grappling with a complex problem--how women can get their emotional needs met without bringing on themselves the wrath of God, the media, men and other women--armed with a myopic strategy, namely one too focused on a coterie of starlets and professional brats.
The introduction, "Manufacturing Fascination" (a possible clue to the cover's inspiration), concludes with the thesis statement: "This is a book about women who wrote and write their own operating manuals, written in the hope that the world may someday be a safer place for them, or for us, for all women."
What follows is a who's who of history's bad girls--Delilah, Amy Fisher, Anne Sexton, Courtney Love--their apologies penned by Wurtzel herself, interspersed with stories of victims no less famous than Sylvia Plath, Princess Di and Nicole Brown.
Most are excused for their mistakes, tantrums and marriages and are molded into examples of how the world punishes "brilliant creatures who shine." The exception is Hillary Clinton, whom Wurtzel lambastes for not demanding a salary and for ignoring Bill's indiscretions; strangely, however, Wurtzel simultaneously praises the First Lady for having "succeeded [at marriage] where so many others have failed or given up or snapped." Others--Paula Jones and Pamela Harriman most notably--Wurtzel shreds, and her litmus test for who merits exoneration and who deserves public humiliation defies analysis.
ODDER STILL is the way Wurtzel, as if dipping into one of her exhaustively chronicled black moods, occasionally fires withering criticism at her subjects for no good reason. For her presumably sympathetic treatment of depressive women to include a sentence like "Margeaux Hemingway seems to have spent the last 20 years thinking that she should have been able to do something with herself because she was beautiful, when in truth, on the evidence, she was capable of absolutely nothing" undermines Wurtzel's humanity, maturity and coherence. Here is cattiness couched in a 400-page attack on sexist nastiness. Go figure.
If Wurtzel's logic suffers unnerving swings, her manic writing should be committed. Pretentious and obfuscating allusions to history and popular culture, parallel-structure sentences that ramble on for most of a page, too many personal confessions and a bad habit of prefacing her opinions with the word "look" (as in "Look, I think many people have rescued themselves from this game") bespeak the mistaken notion that people are privileged to read her self-absorbed, stream-of-consciousness meander through difficult intellectual territory. It's like having a precocious 13-year-old at the dinner table; she may be clever, she may even be right, but her constant need to interject herself impedes the conversation's progress.
And that may be the book's biggest flaw--that Wurtzel is annoying. In spite of her mastery of pop-culture history and her inability to shrink from the truth about where feminism has left women, her voice sounds too young and unseasoned to trust. Even the litany of her naughty escapades--screwing an Italian tattoo artist, snorting heroin, screwing a man twice her age, snorting coke--smacks of smugness, not depth and wealth of experience and sorrow of the sort that makes people speak quietly and honestly.
In the final chapter, she weaves toward a glimmer of humanitarianism in the statement "and [forgiveness over vengeance] has to be the guiding principle, it is the only chance any of us has for happiness." But that's a half page from the end, and the rest of the chapter consists of Wurtzel dissolving into despair that she'll be old and unmarried--or else that outcome would be fine with her (she says both). Ultimately, the forgiveness shtick just seems like so much theater.
When she's disciplined and experienced, Wurtzel will be a force to reckon with. Until then, readers will need patience and occasionally the help of a good dictionary.

Gotta love Wilmer for making the news twice in two days on ATL!

4:34 - such a good point. I can just see the hiring committee salivating over the fact that she's a published author from Yale without taking a second to reflect on the content of what she's written.

4:34 - such a good point. I can just see the hiring committee salivating over the fact that she's a published author from Yale without taking a second to reflect on the content of what she's written.

I heard a rumor some years* ago that she was attending law school with the aim of failing out and writing a book about it. I thought that would make a hilarious book.

* The fact that I heard this a while back raises the question: why is she only a 2L now? Did she repeat 1L year?

"She was attending law school with the aim of failing out..."

Then why on earth did she decide to go to Yale???

When I was in Sweden, and I had to do seventeen interviews in one day, I was snorting cocaine between interviews because I was just so bored! I was tired of saying the same things over and over again. At a certain point I was about to run out of cocaine and my publisher said Don't worry, we'll get you more. Whatever it takes. Sweden has a newspaper culture that we don't have here.

nice pics of her topless too on google ...

4:57pm

I believe so. If I remember correctly, she got booted out of one of her first term classes for not gracefully taking writing critiques from her TA, or some approximation thereof.

Weird, why would an interesting colorful person and a creative writer want to enter the boredom and drudgery filled world that is BIGLAW? Does she really need the money? Perhaps the anti-depressants have completely erased whatever trace of a personality she once had. Are partners really going to trust her with assignments? Won't they worry about her slit wrists getting blood all over the memos?

Which poses an interesting question, what percent of BIGLAW associates are on anti-depressants of some kind? I would guess about 40%, minimum.

What a strange fall from grace. She is classic ADD and law firm life will not suit her at all. The boredom of the day-to-day drudgery will drive her back to the coke in less than a year.

Hey 4:34, are you implying that a disability and/or age should have disqualified her from being a summer associate? is that you korrey?

Anyone know if she is still single?

5:20 - - What's the rent like in fantasy land?

5:15: Wow, she sounds like a real charmer. Gotta love those self-proclaimed geniuses.

I'd hit it.

5:51 - Hell yeah!

Arrested 1997 for shoplifitng - - age 30?? Again, good job Wilmer. Drugs, mental illness, criminal record . . .you would have been better off hiring Loyola 2L.

It is kind of strange that somewhat "celebrity" (i.e. a reasonably well-known published author) has given up that status and entered a normal profession. I can't think of many other examples.

However, didn't Stephen Glass (the person who fabricated articles for TNR) go to GULC and get a clerkship for a DC superior court judge?

Elizabeth Wurtzel strips for action

By Traci Hukill

IF ELIZABETH WURTZEL'S luck holds, this year's $64-million pop-culture question will be, Is the cover of Bitch, the young author's feminist follow-up to Prozac Nation, ironic or a witless attempt at sass? Assuredly it's a marketing coup. Wurtzel's svelte, naked babehood (with nipple Photoshopped out), the manicured hand that lazily flips the reader off and the bored sneer on her delicate face have won this book the distinction of a waiting list at the Metro office.

But how those features relate to a philosophy separate from Katie Roiphe's and Naomi Wolf's "do me" style of seduction-as-power-grab feminism remains unclear, muddled by Wurtzel's intellectual confusion and hyperventilating prose. Wurtzel aptly notes that feminism has failed us, or at least got us stuck between an ideological rock and a desirable hard place, but this book's frustrated rants, uncertain message and simpering conclusion don't help to point the way free.

Wurtzel's capable enough. She's smart, observant, educated and adept with language. But she's grappling with a complex problem--how women can get their emotional needs met without bringing on themselves the wrath of God, the media, men and other women--armed with a myopic strategy, namely one too focused on a coterie of starlets and professional brats.

The introduction, "Manufacturing Fascination" (a possible clue to the cover's inspiration), concludes with the thesis statement: "This is a book about women who wrote and write their own operating manuals, written in the hope that the world may someday be a safer place for them, or for us, for all women."

What follows is a who's who of history's bad girls--Delilah, Amy Fisher, Anne Sexton, Courtney Love--their apologies penned by Wurtzel herself, interspersed with stories of victims no less famous than Sylvia Plath, Princess Di and Nicole Brown.

Most are excused for their mistakes, tantrums and marriages and are molded into examples of how the world punishes "brilliant creatures who shine." The exception is Hillary Clinton, whom Wurtzel lambastes for not demanding a salary and for ignoring Bill's indiscretions; strangely, however, Wurtzel simultaneously praises the First Lady for having "succeeded [at marriage] where so many others have failed or given up or snapped." Others--Paula Jones and Pamela Harriman most notably--Wurtzel shreds, and her litmus test for who merits exoneration and who deserves public humiliation defies analysis.

ODDER STILL is the way Wurtzel, as if dipping into one of her exhaustively chronicled black moods, occasionally fires withering criticism at her subjects for no good reason. For her presumably sympathetic treatment of depressive women to include a sentence like "Margeaux Hemingway seems to have spent the last 20 years thinking that she should have been able to do something with herself because she was beautiful, when in truth, on the evidence, she was capable of absolutely nothing" undermines Wurtzel's humanity, maturity and coherence. Here is cattiness couched in a 400-page attack on sexist nastiness. Go figure.

If Wurtzel's logic suffers unnerving swings, her manic writing should be committed. Pretentious and obfuscating allusions to history and popular culture, parallel-structure sentences that ramble on for most of a page, too many personal confessions and a bad habit of prefacing her opinions with the word "look" (as in "Look, I think many people have rescued themselves from this game") bespeak the mistaken notion that people are privileged to read her self-absorbed, stream-of-consciousness meander through difficult intellectual territory. It's like having a precocious 13-year-old at the dinner table; she may be clever, she may even be right, but her constant need to interject herself impedes the conversation's progress.

And that may be the book's biggest flaw--that Wurtzel is annoying. In spite of her mastery of pop-culture history and her inability to shrink from the truth about where feminism has left women, her voice sounds too young and unseasoned to trust. Even the litany of her naughty escapades--screwing an Italian tattoo artist, snorting heroin, screwing a man twice her age, snorting coke--smacks of smugness, not depth and wealth of experience and sorrow of the sort that makes people speak quietly and honestly.

In the final chapter, she weaves toward a glimmer of humanitarianism in the statement "and [forgiveness over vengeance] has to be the guiding principle, it is the only chance any of us has for happiness." But that's a half page from the end, and the rest of the chapter consists of Wurtzel dissolving into despair that she'll be old and unmarried--or else that outcome would be fine with her (she says both). Ultimately, the forgiveness shtick just seems like so much theater.

When she's disciplined and experienced, Wurtzel will be a force to reckon with. Until then, readers will need patience and occasionally the help of a good dictionary.

From a review of "Bitch":

"Yes, Wurtzel gets arrested for shoplifting -- an experience familiar to habitual drug-abusers. But she is no Everywoman. Hardly a chapter goes by without our being reminded, indirectly, of the rich advances and royalties she must have made on Prozac Nation and Bitch. For a freelance writer, she drops serious cash: $60,000 here on rehab, $10,000 there for a contemplated plastic surgery for tummy-maintenance, an undisclosed amount to rent a Tribeca apartment, "this bright new place where the doormen are called concierges." The economics of being Elizabeth Wurtzel are so extravagant that the reader is left puzzled, unable to make it all add up, since she emphasizes that (unlike what seems to be the large majority of artistic types in New York) she doesn't come from family money."

Review is here:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_4_54/ai_83117153

I have a feeling that the law firm hired her for pure entertainment value.
Seriously, they're shelling out about 30K, not really that much money, to have some fun crazy outspoken self-proclaimed bitch to entertain them for the summer. She's like the court jester of the firm.

Every now and then, a partner will pop their head in her office and say "Ms. Wurtzel, what are your feelings on Courtney Love?" She'll go into some wacky little rant, the partner will walk away chuckling "ha! what a kook!"

And I bet she'd be a blast to have lunch with or go to a party with. I think it's 30k well spent.

Whacked-out law student gets a summer associate job: Not news.

Whacked-out law student has trouble with character & fitness portion of bar application and loses promise of plum Biglaw associate position as a result: Sort of news.

Whacked-out law student fucks half the office at Wilmer during summer associateship: Now we're talking.

7:28 - having trouble with the character and fitness portion of the bar application? are you kidding? people who have been convicted of manslaughter have been admitted to the NY bar (look it up). the character and fitness portion of the application process is a complete, utter and total joke. The interview lasts 3 minutes and consists mostly of "hello", stamp file, "have a nice day".

Gallion OUT!

Better photo of her here:
http://www.freewilliamsburg.com/still_fresh/wurtzel.htm

I was at YLS when this freak show started. She was originally class of 2007, so unless she's summering after graduating, it looks like she's on the four-year plan. And any picture that makes her look younger than 45 DEFINITELY airbrushed.
When Webster came up with a definition for "lunatic" he must have been thinking of this lady. How this lady got into Harvard undergrad and Yale law is a total mystery.

Remember Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction? Now take away the sexy part.

seriously, what the hell is wilmer thinking? maybe someone should give their hiring partner a copy of prozac nation...

Jonb at 6:29 PM: HILARIOUS. Cause it's TRUE.

prozac nation sucked

7:35 here, Gallion. like I said, that would be only mildly interesting if she had a C&F problem. Real interesting would be if she fucked the office, or some other hyperdramatic meltdown happened...

Dear 8:45 pm

"How this lady got into Harvard undergrad and Yale law is a total mystery [?]"

My guess would be on merit, like the rest of the Harvard and Yale students where admitted.

"Remember Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction? Now take away the sexy part."

Sorry May 22, 8:53 pm, but Elizabeth Wurtzel is very sexy.

Granted, she is not Aquagirl, but how many are......

Dear May 22 7:28 pm:

Even if your fantasy of her having sex with fully “half the office” came true, you would still have no chance of getting laid by her or others this decade. Even if we include the plant guy.

she is beyond doubt more grownup and together than almost anyone else at yls -- sometimes much more. can't speak to who she was 10, or even 5, years ago, but i can tell you the woman i see at school can't possibly be any more a detriment to wilmer than a run-of-the-mill yalie

Whoa, she's in one of my classes (a small one) and I never knew who she was until this post. Her comments are actually pretty funny, because she doesn't bother to couch them in any kind of legal analysis. The prof will say "Ms. Wurtzel, do you agree with this opinion?" and she'll say "I think it's moronic. This guy obviously needs to get a life," and that's about it.

6:31 - - top-notch education at Yale.

One of the drawbacks of the demise of xoxo is that a lot of their garbage has washed ashore here.

Ms. Wurtzel is apparently an interesting person, but the negativity on this thread is ridiculous and kinda sad. This is a summer associate job, not a judicial confirmation hearing. Why should a law firm refuse to hire someone who's willing and able to do the work simply because she had an interesting life before law school?

9:29 - - you're an idiot.

Well you do have to admit, that photo of her at http://www.freewilliamsburg.com/still_fresh/wurtzel.htm is pretty hot.

10:25 - umm....NSFW? I nearly got into big trouble following your link

"Why should a law firm refuse to hire someone who's willing and able to do the work simply because she had an interesting life before law school?"

I think this goes way beyond an "interesting life." This woman's broken the law on several occasions and, even worse, is clearly a narcissistic pain in the ass. I am on the hiring committee at my firm and have seen perfectly well-qualified people get turned away for far more innocuous reasons (like a B- in Civ Pro).

6:31: God, I hated when people said that kind of thing in law school. Yes, you're right - Scalia's a "moron" and "needs to get a life." That's his problem.

WilmerHale Beware!
All should guard their secrets well
Novels end careers

Dear 11:40 am:

But Ms. Wurtzel got an A+ in Civil Pro. Naked.

We need more colorful summer associates, so don’t queer this for us.

No doubt if Ms. Wurtzel swan dives off of the Chelsea Pier she will be butt naked.

Her writing's not great, she's flaunted adventures that most attorneys have to hide. She wants to try something different out- many attorneys are on a second career and have equally colorful pasts. Take a look at Cupcake Brown's life. The salacious comments here are truly disturbing. Summer associate positions take work to get, the publishing world is tough to break into- cut the woman some slack, she's figuring her life out like the rest of us.

Yes, Elizabeth Wurtzel is a Depressive, Crazy, Slutty, Genius, Novelist, ... Lawyer

This post is nearly a year old, so I don't know if anyone will ever see this.

Half the posters above "got it" and the other half really were off the mark.

I mean, as Anonymous said:

The salacious comments here are truly disturbing. Summer associate positions take work to get, the publishing world is tough to break into- cut the woman some slack, she's figuring her life out like the rest of us.