Natives in South American mountain ranges had used coca leaves as a stimulant since antiquity, but it wasn’t until a “maximum strength” version was synthesized in 1855 that the rest of the world caught on. Chemists isolated the stimulating drug from the leaves and dubbed the resulting white powder “cocaine.” The European medical community quickly recognized the drug’s power, and it was prescribed as a safe alternative to opium for conditions such as depression and pain. Unfortunately, enthusiastic doctors, such as psychologist Sigmund Freud, did not yet understand its addictive properties. Cocaine was included in all sorts of tonics, including, infamously, the original formulation of Coca-Cola. Georgia druggist John Pemberton’s first cocaine-containing concoction, French Wine Coca, was advertised in 1885 as a “delightful remedy” for all manner of diseases ranging from mental and physical exhaustion to constipation. The ad copy expressly recommended French Wine Coca for people whose work required them to be sedentary for long periods, such as “clergymen, lawyers, and literary men.”
Pemberton removed cocaine from Coca-Cola in 1903 amid growing concern over the drug’s effects, and Congress banned cocaine in 1914. It remained a popular drug throughout the twentieth century, though its usage did not grow to epic proportions until the late 1970s and 1980s, when an influx of cocaine into the United States from Colombia. Cocaine quickly became a status drug for those who could afford it.
According to McInerney, cocaine was “an elitist downtown thing” in Manhattan, “the perfect drug for bright, shiny overachievers. It seemed harmless. It helped you stay up all night, and the next day, if you felt a little comedown, it was a far more effective pick-me-up than a double espresso.” Cocaine was so popular that 43 percent of all Manhattan arrestees tested positive for it in 1984.
For a while, McInerney played into the press’s hands, hitting up clubs and alluding to drug use in interviews. “There was a point when I was competing against my books—and my books were losing,” he said. “People were writing about me, and not my books.” McInerney dated and married a string of heiresses and models. “One of the hardest things to acquire is a persona,” Norman Mailer once told McInerney, “and you’ve got one.”
The truth was, by the time Bright Lights, Big City was published, McInerney was several years removed from his drugged-out disco days in Manhattan. Prior to graduate school at Syracuse, McInerney “thought of writers as luminous madmen who drank too much and drove too fast and scattered brilliant pages along their doomed trajectories.” Carver taught him that writing was 90 percent perspiration. To write, “You had to survive, find some quiet, and work hard every day. Carver saved me a year of further experimentation with the idea that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. I’d already done a fair amount of the destructive stuff.”
Unfortunately, the wheels had been set in motion. Jay McInerney was a hot commodity that publishers were eager to copy. In 1985, just one year removed from Bright Lights, Big City, a twenty-one-year-old writer was already being touted as “the new Jay McInerney.” That writer’s name was Bret Easton Ellis (b. 1964).
Ellis had been working on a novel since he was sixteen, and his college professor (a writer, Joe McGinniss) immediately submitted the manuscript to his own agent after reading it. When Less Than Zero was published in 1985, Ellis was only twenty-one—scarcely older than the drugged-out rich kids he was writing about. “It wasn’t a documentary, but it seemed like one,” McInerney said. Less Than Zero later became a movie starring Robert Downey Jr., who went club hopping with Ellis, further blurring the lines between fact and fiction.
Ellis and McInerney became poster boys for the 1980s, part of a generation that was growing up in the shadows of their parents’ rebellion. Prior to the release of Less Than Zero, Ellis was asked whether there was any rebellion in his generation. “No,” he deadpanned. “I’m going to this really small liberal arts college which likes to think of itself as the last bastion of bohemia, but the two most popular places on this campus now are the computer room and the weight room.” Regardless, he and McInerney were lumped together by journalists as the “toxic twins.” They became fast friends, almost out of necessity.
There were some critics who wondered whether Ellis would let the money from his advances—and the drugs, and the sex, and whatever else they imagined he was up to—go to his head. “He’s in a good position to be chewed up by the time he’s twenty-three,” an editor told the Los Angeles Times in 1986. “It’s hard to live up to this kind of early splash in a town that’s always restless for the next hip novel.”
Ellis, a Los Angeles native, moved to New York after he graduated from college. He had long been in love with the romanticized portrayal of the Big Apple in books and movies and saw it as the place a young writer had to go to make his or her name. His second book, The Rules of Attraction, wasn’t the commercial success that his first book was, but his third book would turn out to be his most controversial and talked-about.
After the stock market crash of 1987, Newsweek declared the yuppie extinct. “Various commentators have been writing obituaries of the yuppie ever since, the most powerful of which was a novel called American Psycho, published in 1991 by Bret Easton Ellis. Ellis’s send-up of the materialism of the era is exhaustive to the point of feeling almost definitive,” wrote McInerney.
“Not since Salman Rushdie ticked off the Ayatollah has a book stirred up so much anger and hatred,” the Los Angeles Times critic Bob Sipchen wrote in 1991. “Bret Easton Ellis hasn’t had to go into hiding, but his new novel, American Psycho, is so offensive that Ellis would be well advised not to show his face in some places.”
Even before its publication, American Psycho drew outrage from women’s and family values groups such as the National Organization for Women for its protagonist’s (literal) skewering of the opposite sex. The story follows twenty-six-year-old Harvard graduate and junk bond trader Patrick Bateman through the upper echelons of Manhattan society in the 1980s. Ellis used the same detailed language to describe Bateman’s designer clothing and tastes in music as he did when writing about Bateman’s serial killing. The book was “about me at the time, and I wrote about all my rage and feelings,” Ellis later said. “I was living that yuppie lifestyle. I was the same age as Patrick Bateman, living in the same building, going to the same places that Patrick Bateman was going to.”
Due in part to consumer boycott threats, American Psycho was dropped by its original publisher, Simon and Schuster, before its release. A rival house quickly picked it up.
The book received not one but two terrible reviews in the New York Times; critics from coast to coast called it boring and humorless, a cynical attempt to generate sales. Ellis was subjected to interviews such as this one, from Entertainment Weekly, in 1991:
EW: In your novel Less Than Zero, a twelve-year-old girl is raped. In The Rules of Attraction, a college girl has a violent sexual experience. Do you see yourself as a completely demented misogynist?
ELLIS: Yes. Yes I am. I am a completely demented misogynist.
EW: Are you saying this facetiously?
ELLIS: What would you say if you were asked this question?
“This is not art,” Tammy Bruce, president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women, told the Los Angeles Times. “Mr. Ellis is a confused, sick young man with a deep hatred of women who will do anything for a fast buck.” Only Norman Mailer rose to Ellis’s defense. “The writer may have enough talent to be taken seriously,” he wrote in Vanity Fair, praising the writing but criticizing the book.
Ellis received death threats, but stuck by his book. “Bateman is a misogynist,” he agreed. “But I would think most Americans learn in junior high to differentiate between the writer and the character he is writing about.”
Where does the author end and his characters begin? The question has been a recurring theme in Ellis’s career. Asked by a reporter if he ever has “Bret Easton Ellis” moments straight out of his books (sex, drugs, partying), El
lis said, “I was staying in the nicest hotel in London [on a book tour in 2010], and it was already feeling very ‘Bret Easton Ellis.’ Then we went to this private club and drugs started appearing,” he said. “We took the party back to my hotel room, where people started to act a bit depraved. And people started to have sex on my couch in front of me, and there were blow lines out in places. At six in the morning I just threw them all out because I finally needed to go to sleep.” He stressed that most nights he leads a simpler life. As far as vices go, Ellis has said that his only poison these days is a really good tequila.
Ellis, now in his forties, has moved back to L.A., where he works primarily as a television and movie screenwriter. “I had a really good run in New York,” he told Interview magazine. He worries about his drinking sometimes, but not enough do anything about it. He did follow someone to an AA meeting once—for sex, not sobriety. He has made oblique references to drugs in interviews and on social media platforms but insists that he is “not interested” in drugs any longer. “The party ends at a certain point,” he has said.
Ellis’s toxic twin, McInerney, has also struggled to distance himself from his own party boy image. “I don’t necessarily want to be the symbol of hard, fast living. It’s part of what I’m still up against—the very powerful stereotype that’s developed around me as a result of that first book. I think it’s confusing for some people to think of me writing about something else. But that’s what I have to do. I have to grow and change and develop. And I have to convince my readers to come along with me.” Still, McInerney acknowledges that, without his original persona, his continued success wouldn’t be possible. “If I hadn’t written Bright Lights, I’d probably be teaching freshmen English in Kansas right now.”
McInerney has always seemed to have a keen sense of self-awareness. In a 1986 interview, he worried out loud about the fate of writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald who were identified with boom times. When cocaine and clubbing became passé, would McInerney take the fall? “If being a spokesman for a generation is a fleeting occupation, being a symbol of an era is downright dangerous for anyone who has the bad luck to outlive it,” McInerney wrote.
But McInerney didn’t retreat into a shell of a man like Fitzgerald. Instead, McInerney—whose only vices these days are “wine and sex”—has continued to write and publish, stunning critics with his longevity. Time magazine has called him the “Dick Clark of literature” for his seeming perennial youth and ability to hit the clubs and make headlines well into his fifties.
24
Prozac Nation
“The shortness of life makes everything seem pointless when I think about the longness of death.”
—ELIZABETH WURTZEL
Like Bret Easton Ellis, Elizabeth Wurtzel (b. 1967) is a member of Generation X, the American generation that started to come of age in the 1980s. The decade went by without any significant youth revolution. “I think there is no rebellion, not because kids are stupid or slothful, but because the dark side of America is now in charge,” Hunter S. Thompson said.
“We were always in the shadow of the baby boomers,” Wurtzel says. “Reagan had lowered the tax rate forty points and being rich became a great thing all of a sudden. No one cared about young people in the eighties, because they were too busy with themselves. We were uniquely fucked up. We grew up under divorce. Even people whose parents weren’t divorced grew up around people who were. Homes were unstable.”
Youth movements had once been identifiable by literary movements (the Beats, the Lost Generation, the Decadents). Starting with the hippies in the United States in the 1960s, however, writers’ influence in popular culture had been on the decline. By the 1980s, Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis were just two writers fighting against a flood of entertainment unleashed by cable television and MTV. When Generation X finally came of age, it was thanks to a rock band. “When Nirvana started selling records, people finally knew about us,” Wurtzel says. “I remember watching Nirvana on Saturday Night Live in 1991 with my mother, and there’s this guy who’s a brutal example of what happens, of what Reagan did to us. I said, ‘Oh my God, Mom, we won.’ There’s something poignant about him singing, ‘Here we are now, entertain us.’ ” Nirvana and the “grunge music” revolution knocked bands like Poison and Warrant off the top of the charts. After twelve years of Reagan-Bush economic deregulation, people had enough and elected southern Democrat Bill Clinton to the White House in 1992. It was the dawn of a new era.
As a music journalist, Wurtzel was well positioned to be a spokesperson for Generation X. She had been racking up bylines and accolades since she was a teenager. By the time she turned seventeen, she had already been published in Seventeen magazine. She wrote for the Harvard Crimson while studying for her undergraduate degree in the mid-1980s, which earned her a Rolling Stone Magazine College Journalism Award in 1986. She also wrote for the Dallas Morning News and The New Yorker before she was out of college. Unfortunately, she was also battling a terrible depression that had been plaguing her since she was twelve or thirteen.
“There is a classic moment in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt, and all he can say in response is, ‘Gradually and then suddenly.’ When someone asks how I lost my mind, that’s all I can say too,” Wurtzel wrote.
Wurtzel’s mental health improved with antidepressants—and years of therapy. She turned her ongoing battle with depression into Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America (working title: “I Hate Myself and Want to Die”). It was an instant bestseller in 1994. “Love it or hate it, people are freaking out over Prozac Nation,” Vice magazine wrote. “Fans claim the book is an extremely detailed and realistic depiction of what it’s like to suffer from depression and that it should be required reading for psychiatric professionals and anyone who has ever battled with the disease or had antidepressants prescribed to them.” Critics panned the work as the insufferable diary of a “neurotic, smart, sexy, rich, self-obsessed Jewish girl.”
Wurtzel, who appeared in portrait on the front of her book jacket, became a face for the dark side of Generation X—for the products of broken homes and twelve years of trickle-down economics. Millions of young people were being prescribed antidepressants. While it’s unfair to lay the blame at politicians’ or parents’ feet for a nation of depressed and agitated youth (such an accusation ignores the genetic component of mental health disorders), something was clearly in the air.
As we’ve seen in many of the preceding chapters, though, Wurtzel wasn’t the first writer to turn to legal psychiatric drugs to find her way back to sanity. Overall, writers and artists have been wary of taking mood-altering legal drugs for fear of affecting their creativity. The irony, of course, is that many of them have thought nothing of snorting cocaine or smoking a joint. “The question of whether the ‘real you’ is the person on lithium or the person on illegal drugs doesn’t matter,” Wurtzel says. “What matters is whether you function or not. We don’t know that the medication isn’t helping you become the real you. There’s only a control group of one for any of us. Whatever the ‘real you’ is, we don’t know the answer. We never will. It’s an impossible question.”
After the success of Prozac Nation, Wurtzel received a $500,000 advance for her next project, Bitch, a defense of “difficult women” such as Amy Fisher and Monica Lewinsky. She quickly ran into trouble: Ritalin and cocaine. Wurtzel checked in and out of rehab, but couldn’t shake her addictions. She relapsed and finally moved into the offices of her publisher, Doubleday, to finish the book.
In her second memoir, More, Now, Again, she chronicled her time at their New York offices, doing coke and sleeping in an office that they provided her. “I don’t know why they didn’t care more about my drug use,” she tells me. “It was such a crazy situation. They didn’t know what to do with me. You have an author who’s coming in and just taking over. My editor, Betsy Lerner, didn’t know what to do with me.” Eventually, her publisher told her, “P
encils down, Liz.” That was the end of the book, and she left their offices and decided to return to rehab.
Before Wurtzel checked in to the hospital, she telephoned her friend and fellow addict, Rob Bingham. Bingham was an author whose debut short story collection had just been published by Doubleday. He was well-known for throwing launch parties for his literary journal Open City at his Tribeca loft, where drugs and alcohol were always in plentiful supply. Wurtzel recalled shooting smack with Bingham once underneath his pool table while other guests snorted coke off the pages of the Paris Review. “No one ever had the sense to separate the truly desperate from the merely decadent,” Wurtzel later wrote. “We were all doing too many drugs together at the same time, the people who could handle it with the people who were going to end up dead and worse, and we were too young to see where all this was going to lead.” Wurtzel told Bingham that he was the best fiction writer of their generation, and that she couldn’t wait to read the debut novel that he was working on.
“Every recovered addict I have ever met knows his sobriety date and knows how many years he has been straight. Every addict can remember when enough was finally enough, when something had to give,” Wurtzel wrote in More, Now, Again. “I will never forget October 10, 1998. I will never forget the last time I used.” After she successfully completed her rehab program, her publisher presented her with a framed pencil with the phrase “Pencils Down.” It now hangs in her kitchen, a constant reminder of her battle with cocaine and Ritalin addiction and the toll it took on her writing.
Bitch was savaged by critics. The New York Times Book Review said it was “full of enormous contradictions, bizarre digressions and illogical outbursts,” though it was “honest, insightful, and witty.” In other words, the book was much like its author.
Literary Rogues Page 18
