Reading Prozac Nation as a Post-Humanist Resistance to the Recovery Narrative

Abstract

ABSTRACT Elizabeth Wurtzel’s memoir Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America is an iconic example of the recovery narrative. The genre of the recovery narrative relies on a prelapsarian origin to which the subject can and should return, and this origin is particularly loaded for narratives about women’s mental health. Wurtzel resists the logic and underlying ideology and teleology of the recovery narrative. She does not recover an identity from before her depression, instead insisting on its fundamental constitution of her subjectivity.This article will argue that Wurtzel’s is a cybogian autobiography in a Harawayian sense. Haraway’s use of the term ‘cyborg’ refers to a post-technology subject with the ability to epistemologically distance themselves from the essentialist, naturalist binaries of western thought. Haraway’s theory resonates with Wurtzel’s memoir; Wurtzel resistance to the teleology of healing within the recovery narrative is a resistance to nostalgia for a prelapsarian selfhood. Wurtzel does not ‘recover’ based on a spiritual or moral overcoming; she finds some peace in Prozac. Wurtzel is an example of American women memoirists writing a subjectivity deeply embedded in the material world and constituted by experiences of alterity and technology – both the technology of antidepressants and the technology of genre.