More, Now, Again

I crush up my pills and snort them like dust. They are my sugar. They are the sweetness in the days that have none. They drip through me like tupelo honey. Then they are gone. Then I need more. I always need more. For all of my life I have needed more. A precocious literary light, Elizabeth Wurtzel published her groundbreaking memoir of depression, Prozac Nation, at the tender age of twenty-six. A worldwide success, a cultural phenomenon, the book opened doors to a rarefied world about which Elizabeth had only dared to dream during her middle-class upbringing in New York City. But no success could staunch her continuous battle with depression. The terrible truth was that nothing had changed the emptiness inside Elizabeth. Her relationships universally failed; she was fired from every magazine job she held. Indeed, the absence of fulfillment in the wake of success became yet another seemingly insurmountable hurdle. When her doctor prescribed Ritalin to boost the effects of her antidepression medication, Elizabeth jumped. And the Ritalin worked. And worked. And worked. Within weeks, she was grinding up the pills and snorting them for a greater effect. It reached the point where she couldn't go more than five minutes without a fix. It was Ritalin, and then cocaine, and then more Ritalin. In a harrowing account, Elizabeth Wurtzel contemplates what it means to be in love with something in your blood that takes over your body, becomes the life force within you -- and could ultimately kill you. More, Now, Again is an astonishing and timely story of a new kind of addiction. But it is also a story of survival. Elizabeth Wurtzel hits rock bottom, gets clean, uses again, and finally gains control over her drug and her life. As honest as a confession and as heartfelt as a prayer, More, Now, Again recounts a courageous fight back to a life worth living.