Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel Read Free Book Online Page A

like
sexy
or
fuck you
with the knowing, mimicking voices of children who have spent far too much time in the company of adults.
    I think the type is epitomized by the daughter in the film
The Goodbye Girl.
She is far more levelheaded and reasonable than her dancer-mom, who is juggling romance and rent and a career and an aching back with a certain unflappable humor that always seems on the verge of giving way to a complete emotional breakdown. Marsha Mason is meant to come across as, without a doubt, a good and responsible mother—in fact she is clearly nuts about her daughter and has absolutely no negligent or abusive tendencies—but she is, basically, in over her head. That was what my mom was like: Somehow, the bills always got paid, the babysitter always got paid, the private school scholarships always came through, and she always found the odd bit of part-time work that kept us fed and clothed. But it was so very precarious. I always had the vague sense that we were one paycheck or one man or one job away from welfare. I can remember standing on line with my mom to collect unemployment benefits, and I can remember listening to her plead with my father to send me to a
real
doctor, that there was no way she was going to take me to some clinic even if he thought it was good enough. Money, or the lack of it, pervaded the house as only something that is absent can.
    But in the midst of this strange and insecure household, my mom and I, much like the mother and daughter in
The Goodbye Girl,
managed to have tons of fun, to be better as pals than we ever were as parent and child. Since I went to a Jewish school where the divorce rate among parents was fairly low (that was the main reason my mom sent me there), I would visit friends’ homes and find myself amazed at how glum things seemed compared to life at our apartment. The fathers always seemed so old and distant and unapproachable, wearing their business suits and showing up in the kids’ bedrooms only to offer discipline or help with homework. They were already graying and paunchy, and they usually smelled bad, in that certain fatherly way; the moms quite simply lacked style, were dowdy and schoolmarmish, and they often smelled bad to me as well. They were no fun, and they never seemed like the kind of people you could call by their first names no matter how old you were. The sheer joy of having kids seemed completely lost on them. They did not
get down
with parenthood. My mom, on the other hand, really hung out with me whenever she was at home, helping me fill in the patterns on the Lite-Brite or dunking Oreo cookies in milk with me or dancing around the living room with me while we played
Free to Be You and Me.
    Alone with babysitters a fair amount of time, I would often befriend the teenage girls who came around to watch me while my mom worked. They all seemed to enjoy braiding my long, long hair or teaching me how to draw with charcoal and pastels, and not just Magic Markers. I’d ask about their boyfriends and try to convince them to invite them over for me to check out. One of my babysitters had a father who was a drunk and held us locked in the apartment in a state of holy terror for several hours as he banged on the door and threatened to kill us both. Another babysitter had an older brother who was studying to be a priest. Years later I found out that she’d become a crack addict and had had two babies out of wedlock.
    But it didn’t much matter who was given the task of watching me for the few hours between the end of the school day and my mother’s return from work because I was always perfectly content to be left alone with one of my many odd projects, whether it was breeding grasshoppers that I’d brought home with me from day camp, or writing an illustrated series of books about different kinds of animals, or just sitting around with my math workbooks and zooming ahead through multiplication and division when everyone else in