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More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction

More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction

List Price: $25.00
Your Price: $16.50
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Terrific book
Review: Elizabeth Wurtzell is a great writer. She has captured, better than anyone else I've read, what it means for a bright girl with all the supposed advantages to still live in hell. The writing flows and the reading is addictive (pardon the pun). There is a lot here, and anyone who's ever looked in the mirror and wondered who they were or what point their life had will thoroughly enjoy this book. It's not always an easy read-Elizabeth provides ample gory details of just how disfiguring and unhealthy addiction can become-but it's well worth the time and effort. Since beginning the book I haven't been able to put it down.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: An AMAZING book
Review: I couldn't put this book down. Elizabeth Wurtzel is an amazing writer. She just pulls you in when she writes (about herself in particular). She is fascinating, brilliant, witty, and honest. If you haven't read this or her first book, Prozac Nation, you are missing out!!!

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Not quite addictive
Review: Reading an Elizabeth Wurtzel book is like watching a slow-motion train moving towards a stalled car: you don't really want to look because of the impending crash, but you look anyhow. Her latest book, "More Now Again" is a peculiar look inside the mind of a repeat addict, which has some definite bumpy spots sprinkled with insight.

It begins as Wurtzel is seemingly clean of her drug addictions, until she is prescribed Ritalin for an attention-span problem. However, she soon began crushing the pills and snorting them, as she once did cocaine, because she missed sniffing things. Soon cocaine and stolen pills are back in her life, as she ends up stuck in obsessive behavior patterns, engages in inept shoplifting, and spins back into the world of addiction.

Wurtzel is alternately annoying and sympathetic; she frankly admits to handicapping marriages whenever she can, and to stealing when big-store clerks don't serve her fast enough, though she claims to scrupulously not steal from small stores. At the same time, there is something pitifully sympathetic about her spiral into addiction and the humiliating arrest when she was unable to stop sobbing. It's difficult to explain exactly what qualities in Wurtzel are either annoying or endearing, because of the blatant honesty with which she presents unsympathetic facets of herself such as, for example, her rantings about how she feels for Timothy McVeigh. There are passages where readers will sympathize with Wurtzel's long-suffering mother, who wants her to be "normal."

However, her descriptions of both drug addiction and the psychological state that drags certain people back to it is both harrowing and revealing. We see Wurtzel obsessively underlining interesting passages in a book and tweezing her legs to the bone, but walking around with filthy hair and a shirt stained with spilled coffee and tea. However, she does not go to the other extreme, which too often ends up glamorizing addiction; rather, she tells the reader plainly and calmly what she does, without overemphasizing it. Only occasionally does her prose lapse into a sense of true panic and/or despair. In one particularly affecting passage, she describes the mindset of a repeat addict: "It's the stuff people can handle that makes addicts get high. We get high over nothing."

Perhaps the best look at Wurtzel is the picture on the back cover. Though at first glance she seems like a conventionally pretty blonde with artfully-arranged hair, makeup and clothing, her large, heavily dark-rimmed, staring eyes add an air of bizarre sadness to her face.

Her writing style has an addled air most of the time, as if she were still on drugs as she wrote it. The frequent lapses into self-examination are sometimes interesting but sometimes merely seem self-indulgent. However, they never lack in response quality: whether it is an angry bristling or nods of sudden understanding, the readers WILL react with one emotion or another.

Love her or loathe her, Elizabeth Wurtzel provides a bizarre, sometimes disgusting look at addiction in this follow-up to "Prozac Nation." Her fans will enjoy it, her detractors will be revolted by it, and newcomers may not be sure what to think.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: and a calliope crashed to the ground
Review: ...this one can write and tells funny though unedited stories of what a train wreck she is and you got to dig the courage to say that in print when all the rest of us are train wrecks but walk around in docker pants talking about the lakers game...

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Excellent Memoir of Addiction
Review: I tried to avoid reading this book and was simply unable. I was upset when I read of Elizabeth's Wurtzel's remarks about 9/11 and had resolved not to read More, Now, and Again, although I did feel Prozac Nation was an excellent read and important to the literature of depression.
However, I recently visited the new local library and there was More, Now, and Again sitting on the New Book shelf, staring at me. I was compelled to grab the book and check it out. I read the book over the next few days and I was not disappointed. Elizabeth is a fine writer and her memoir is excellent and above all, honest. I am a veteran's nurse and whatever I am able to learn about the psychology of addiction helps me to better care for my patients, many of whom are substance abusers.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: The Naked Truth , Addiction is Ugly
Review: Elizabeth Wurtzel..... Elizabeth who? The book More,Now,Again was my introduction this talented, don't go quietly into the night, author. Her gut wrenchingly honest account of the addicts desperation and where it can take you physically as well as emotionally ,begets empathy for there plight. This book has lead me to read Elizabeth's first book Prozac Nation, consequently illuminating her quest for some kind normalcy of mind through pharmaceutical magic. The magic did not last long as More,Now,Again can attest.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Oh, Please
Review: If you want to read a great and unflinching
study of addiction without the whining, read Hubert Selby Jr.'s
Requiem for a Dream. 'Nuff said.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Self-destruction personified
Review: After reading this book, I truly believe that God, fate or whom/whatever likes to curse people that are given the brains/looks/charm to get whatever she decides she wants. This ability to use/abuse one's recources thereby inevitably ends in the hell of disappointment, or in a drug rehab facility. As Oscar Wilde said, there are two tragedies in life: not getting what one wants, and getting it. That would be the story of my life! If this is the story of your life as well, read this book and *try* to heed it's lessons, especially if you have a spoiled/elitist bent and don't think things that are bad happen to people like you. They do, and usually, they are of your own making... and without the assistance evil intentions or bad luck. Take it from one who knows!!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A great writer
Review: It takes a great writer to write a great memoir. Only someone with a strong grasp of the language and a unique writing style can make a tale of their day-to-day life interesting. Ms. Wurtzel succeds on both levels. Some writers send most of us to the dictionary over and over to look up words that turn out to be pompous instead of necessary. When Wurtzel sent me to the dictionary it was for a perfect description of a situation.

The subject matter is not pretty. Addiction is ugly, and Wurtzel shows us that. She shows us flashes of a beautiful life, interspersed with long stretches of appaling mediocrity, and peppered with periods of disgusting depravity. If you want to understand what it would be like to live as an addict-a clinically depressed addict-then you should read this book

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: In Defense of Miss Wurtzel's Latest Work
Review: I must say that I have been alarmed and dismayed at the mediocre reviews this book has incurred since its release earlier this year. In fact, the critisims of these reviews are so completely unwarrented many of them have led me to the question: "Did we actually read the same book?" The most common complaints seem to have been that she (the author) is to "whiny"; her readers are sick of reading about her life (we've read prozac nation...its time for something else); she sheds no new light on the subject of addiction, its causes or recovery; and that she is too self interested for her own good.
The first argument I that am compelled to make in Miss Wurtzel's defense is that the genre of this particular work is a biography or autobiography. Therefore, it serves its exact intent and purpose, the definition and of such a work by any author is to reflect on and relate one's own life or the life of another. In this case the subject matter was the same as her first book, namely her own life, however this book is not rehashing old material, "Prozac Nation" was released in 1994, "More, Now, Again" cover almost eight years since that time. In that respect, if a particular reader is not interested in the twists and turns Miss Wurtzel's life has taken since her first Autobiography, they are hardly being mislead. The title itself "...A Memoir of Addiction" ensures that the reader knows exactly the type of material that they are about to read. No surprises there. Furthermore, using her own life as the subject matter for this, her fourth book, is hardly tedious. If her life were in some way uninteresting, perhaps it would be, but this is hardly the case.
Furthermore, the criticism that she fails to shed new light on the subject of addiction is also hastily given. Elizabeth Wurtzel is plagued by her own "terminal uniqueness", and even though her therapists caution against this attitude, I believe it to be completely accurate. Even though untold numbers of addiction victims pass in and out of rehab centers all over the country ever year, no two experiences are ever identical. Therefore, of course Miss Wurtzel's tale of addiction and recovery will be unique and fresh because they are her own.
Finally, these critics have left out SUCH a crucial feature of this, or any Elizabeth Wurtzel creation: her intense writing style as well as her incredible grasp of the English language. She is not only an eloquent writer, she is a powerfully original one as well. The prose she adds to the cannon of non-fiction, or any literary genre for that matter, are not only important, but impossible to ignore.


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