[.ca] Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women (ISBN 0385484011)

From Amazon.com:
Elizabeth Wurtzel, an ex-rock critic for The New Yorker, won controversial fame with her bestselling 1994 memoir Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America, which described how Prozac saved the precocious Harvard grad from suicide. Her second book, Bitch is a celebration of the defiant, rock-and-roll spirit of self-destructive women through the ages: Delilah, Amy Fisher, Princess Di, and hundreds more (including the awesomely reckless Wurtzel). There is no comprehensible central line of argument, perhaps because the author did her exhaustive research and writing on a speedy Kerouacesque drug binge that, by her own admission, sent her to rehab upon the book's conclusion. But Wurtzel has the remains of a fine mind: her insights are often sharp, sometimes bitchy, and always shameless as she zooms in a very few pages from The Oresteia to O.J. to her first crush on a fictional character Heathcliff) to Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, Richard Pryor, Chrissie Hynde, Leaving Las Vegas, Gone with the Wind, Sylvia Plath's "Daddy," Schindler's List, Oliver! Carousel, and Andrea Dworkin. Most pop culture pundits incline to grandiose blather, but Wurtzel is punchy, and her quotes are more often apt than pretentious. Bitch is like a Mr. Toad's Wild Ride in a library, with frequent rampages through the film and music archives. Like rock music, Wurtzel's prose style lives for the moment. She glories in breaking rules to bits, is never giddier than when she's saying something shocking, and apparently has no moral code except self-expression--with the attitude volume knob cranked up to 11. --Tim Appelo

Disappointing, pseudo-feminism:
I started reading this book soon after I had finished Susan Faludi's "Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women". I was looking forward to reading Wurtzel's book as a representative woman of'90s post-backlash era where women are allowed to be independent and make their own choices AND say what they want about it. Unfortunately, Wurtzel has once again set us back, again to the '80s, where women are allowed to be independent as long as they suffer the consequences of failed love relationships, success based only on their looks, and empty rebellion for the sake of rebellion. Wurtzel, using a handful of notororious examples including herself, argues that there is something inherent about women that makes them self-destructive, usually in the name of a man. Furthermore, Wurtzel seems to lack adequate knowledge about the psychology of women, using Carol Gilligan, a little respected '70s "feminist" psychologist, as her only scholarly-based evidence on the problems faced by adolescent girls. Instead of discussing empirically-based findings on the social problems that still plague women today, she resorts to personality and psychodynamic based explanations about why there are so many women who are screwed up. It seems that she's been to too many unhelpful therapy sessions and has now used herself as a basis of generalizing to an entire generation of women...unfair and just as bad as prevailing traditional stereotypes about good, little women.

Self-justification masking as feminism:
I gave this book two stars for its readability; however, its engaging style only made me more annoyed that the book suffered from such an extreme lack of focus. Elizabeth Wurtzel (as she constantly reminds us in every book she's ever written) is attractive, connected, and well-educated. It is clear from even the most unfocused ramblings in "Bitch" that she is also intelligent, insightful, and erudite. It is also clear that the thing she values most about herself is her good looks, which appears to be what she spends most of her life thinking about and obsessing over, like she's in a perpetual state of smugness at having won the genetic lottery. I always get the impression when I read Wurtzel that she is a) totally shallow and self-obsessed, and b) keenly aware that shallowness, obsession with one's own beauty, and openly judging others by their looks isn't "cool", so she has to spend hundreds of pages justifying all the energy she spends thinking about nothing more than herself and how much prettier she is than average girls. The result: "Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women". In the end, this book is nothing more than Wurtzel's attempt to intellectually justify her painfully obvious feelings of superiority over women who are not as attractive as her. As a graduate student that men also flirt with alot, I can honestly say that I find Wurtzel's self-worship both sad and immature. I also can't figure out why she still tries to pull off the whole "I do drugs to ease my self-hatred at being so beautiful and brilliant and alienated" routine - yawn, Ms. Wurtzel, your pose is showing. The bottom line: no matter how many great books she's read herself, she has yet to write one. If she can get over herself and off the speed, maybe someday she will, and I look forward to reading it. Until then, she should stick to concert reviews for Rolling Stone.

A mind is a terrible thing to waste:
And what a waste it is. I had the feeling I was on crystal meth during this painfully meandering and meaningless read. I was on the mark as it turned out from her next disaster. I don't hold much truck with an author who keeps writing "I mean" and other phatic communication devices designed for verbal communication. The pen is truly mightier than the sword - a sword can't bore you to death.

I cook for a livin'...:
But I read a lot too...and I love difficult/high maintenance/troubled/bad, et al, women...I loved this book. De ol' devilchef gives dis tome a 5 mojo*z review!!!

Can't finish it.:
I tried to read this book twice and couldn't finish it. It is very bad, and the sentences are long and confusing, and Elizabeth Wurtzel has no direction in the book. Try 'Prozac Nation', but even that is not much better.