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 & 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.


From Library Journal
There is little praise for women in Wurtzel's hyperbolic rant about "bad girls" and their relationship to Western society. Indeed, hip turns of phrase frequently replace logic in this often smug and overwritten screed. In her defense, Wurtzel (Prozac Nation, LJ 8/94) has taken on a huge project, and every now and again she introduces a startling insight about how women manipulate situations to control their lives. Her look at the biblical tale of Samson and Delilah is particularly instructive in elucidating the history of our reaction to the alluringly repulsive femme fatale. Likewise, her presentation of both mythic and real women who flaunt their "pussy power" makes for provocative reading. Nonetheless, nearly a quarter of the book focuses on Nicole Brown Simpson (who few would call a "difficult woman") and is shockingly mean-spirited. While she lambastes the Simpson jury as "just plain stupid," we never learn how she knows what the jury did not: that O.J. killed Nicole. Since she was not in the courtroom, her cavalier dismissal of the verdict rankles and casts doubt on her other arguments. Worse, she seems to believe that violence is endemic to being "crazy in love," and her writing romanticizes the black eye and slapped cheek as proof of passionate involvement. In addition, Wurtzel completely ignores lesbians?an odd omission since the expression of Sapphic love represents a blatant rejection of "good girl" norms?and dismisses the happily single, writing that "it would be easier to eliminate racism or end poverty or cure illiteracy or dethrone Fidel Castro than it would to make girls stop wanting to be brides." Recommended only as catalyst for debate.-?Eleanor J. Bader, New School for Social Research, New YorkCopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Karen Lehrman
While Bitch is full of enormous contradictions, bizarre digressions and illogical outbursts, it is also one of the more honest, insightful and witty books on the subject of women to have come along in a while.


Entertainment Weekly, Dana Kennedy
The prose, seemingly untouched by editors, is windy, incessantly self-referential, and packed with show-offy references.... It's also an extraordinarily thought-provoking, absorbing, wise, often poignant read. You can disagree with Wurtzel, but at least she always has a passionate point of view.


The Washington Post Book World, Barbara Raskin
Bitch is a show-stopping, name-dropping, gossip-dishing, wild rock-n-roll performance--a Janis Joplin-Courtney Love-Madonna-style raucous, raving, ranting, shout-in-your-face soliloquy.... Although I'm not always certain what the author is saying, I definitely love her for saying it. Sometimes she does extract new meanings from the froth of daily life; other times she stretches too far seeking evidence to make her points. Her analogies, similes and metaphors are wildly exuberant, and exciting.


From Kirkus Reviews
The epithet bitch has no male equivalent, and Wurtzel explains this inequity in a series of overgrown essays that swings from insightful to banal. At its best, Wurtzel's discursive style is akin to soapbox oratory. Studying women throughout history, from Delilah to Zelda Fitzgerald, who have gained influence by using their sexuality to manipulate men and events, Wurtzel points out that this path has often been the only option for women seeking to be both powerful and sexy. But a woman who uses sex appeal to gain power is also likely to be dismissed, vilified, or, at the very least, labeled dangerous or difficult. But while there's some thoughtful analysis, a lot of entertaining information, and a good deal of clever writing, the book digresses too often from its central notion to persuade any but the already converted that the world can't handle difficult women. Indeed, it appears that what has proven most difficult for bitches has been handling their own power. Wurtzel identifies with their difficult choices and suffering and helps us empathize, yet her attitude toward the women she chooses to study often seems ambivalent. Expositions on desire, anger, sex, and madness figure throughout this serpentine analysis. Mostly her message gets bogged down in a tangle of bitching. As in her previous work, Prozac Nation (1994), Wurtzel generalizes from her own experience. To rephrase a Muriel Rukeyser poem she cites, the world would not split open if one woman told the truth about her life. ``It would more likely derogate such `truth' by reducing it to no more than a silly girl's excessive emotionalism,'' Wurtzel writes, taking a preemptive strike at her detractors. At its worst, the book becomes an extended defense of Wurtzel's own recalcitrant ``bad'' behavior. Wurtzel's talent for provocative prose and sexy subjects perfectly lends itself to a screed on female power that is refreshing and irritating by turns. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
Bitch, Elizabeth Wurtzel's second book, was written over the course of a year in which she lived in four different apartments, three hotels, one seamy residential motel, and two houses. But the book is anything but transient. In luminescent prose, Wurtzel takes to task a double standard imposed on women: the cultural insistence on goodness and society's complete obsession with badness.

No one understands the desire to be bad more than Elizabeth Wurtzel. Bitch is a brilliant tract on the history of manipulative female behavior. By looking at women who derive their power from their sexuality, Wurtzel offers a trenchant cultural critique of contemporary gender relations. Beginning with Delilah, the first woman to supposedly bring a great man down (latter-day Delilahs include Yoko Ono, Pam Smart, and Bess Myerson), Wurtzel finds many biblical counterparts to the men and women in today's headlines. In five brilliant essays, she links the lives of women as demanding and disparate as Amy Fisher, Hillary Clinton, Margaux Hemingway, and Nicole Brown Simpson. Wurtzel gives voice to those women whose lives have been misunderstood, who have been dismissed for their beauty, their madness, their youth. She finds in the story of Amy Fisher the tragic plight of all Lolitas, our thirst for their brief and intense flame. She connects Hemingway's tragic suicide to those of Sylvia Plath, Edie Sedgwick, and Marilyn Monroe, women whose beauty was ultimately an end in itself. Writing about the wife/mistress dichotomy, Wurtzel explains how some women are anointed wife material whileothersare relegated to the role of mistress.

Both celebratory and cautionary, Bitch catalogues some of the most infamous women in history, defending their outsize desires, describing their exquisite loneliness, and championing their take-no-prisoners approach to life and to love. Whether writing about Courtney Love, Sally Hemings, Bathsheba, Kimba Wood, Sharon Stone, or Princess Di — or waxing eloquent on the hideous success of The Rules, the evil that is The Bridges of Madison County, the twisted logic of You'll Never Make Love in This Town Again — Wurtzel is back with a bitchography that cuts to the core.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Bitch is a tract on the history of manipulative female behavior. By looking at women who derive their power from their sexuality, Wurtzel offers a trenchant cultural critique of contemporary gender relations. Beginning with Delilah, the first woman to supposedly bring a great man down (latter-day Delilahs include Yoko Ono, Pam Smart, Bess Myerson), Wurtzel finds many biblical counterparts to the men and women in today's headlines. In five extended essays, she links the lives of women as demanding and disparate as Amy Fisher, Hillary Clinton, Margaux Hemingway, and Nicole Brown Simpson. Wurtzel gives voice to those women whose lives have been misunderstood, who have been dismissed for their beauty, their madness, their youth. She finds in the story of Amy Fisher the tragic plight of all Lolitas, our thirst for their brief and intense flame. She connects Hemingway's tragic suicide to those of Sylvia Plath, Edie Sedgwick, and Marilyn Monroe, women whose beauty was an end, ultimately, in itself. Wurtzel, writing about the wife/mistress dichotomy, explains how some women are anointed as wife material, while others are relegated to the role of mistress. She takes to task the double standard imposed on women, the cultural insistence on goodness and society's complete obsession with badness: what's a girl to do? Bitch tells a tale both celebratory and cautionary as Wurtzel catalogs some of the most infamous women in history, defending their outsize desires, describing their exquisite loneliness, championing their take-no-prisoners approach to life and to love.

SYNOPSIS

A look at the history of manipulative female behavior, from Delilah to Amy Fisher.

FROM THE CRITICS

BUST Magazine

You've probably already heard all about this book, in which Elizabeth Wurtzel takes up the cause of the bitch, tracing her history from biblical times to modern day. But what you may not have heard is that the book is good....Even if you don't agree with Wurtzel's conclusions, I guarantee that you will never view news stories about women the same way again.

Library Journal

There is little praise for women in Wurtzel's hyperbolic rant about "bad girls" and their relationship to Western society. Indeed, hip turns of phrase frequently replace logic in this often smug and overwritten screed. In her defense, Wurtzel (Prozac Nation, LJ 8/94) has taken on a huge project, and every now and again she introduces a startling insight about how women manipulate situations to control their lives. Her look at the biblical tale of Samson and Delilah is particularly instructive in elucidating the history of our reaction to the alluringly repulsive femme fatale. Likewise, her presentation of both mythic and real women who flaunt their "pussy power" makes for provocative reading. Nonetheless, nearly a quarter of the book focuses on Nicole Brown Simpson (who few would call a "difficult woman") and is shockingly mean-spirited. While she lambastes the Simpson jury as "just plain stupid," we never learn how she knows what the jury did not: that O.J. killed Nicole. Since she was not in the courtroom, her cavalier dismissal of the verdict rankles and casts doubt on her other arguments. Worse, she seems to believe that violence is endemic to being "crazy in love," and her writing romanticizes the black eye and slapped cheek as proof of passionate involvement. In addition, Wurtzel completely ignores lesbiansan odd omission since the expression of Sapphic love represents a blatant rejection of "good girl" normsand dismisses the happily single, writing that "it would be easier to eliminate racism or end poverty or cure illiteracy or dethrone Fidel Castro than it would to make girls stop wanting to be brides." Recommended only as catalyst for debate. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/1/97.]Eleanor J. Bader, New School for Social Research, New York

Lily Burana - Salon

I was so hungry for this book. Bitch has been hyped as a text that would examine the way women are punished for misbehavior that would seem merely piquant in men, how female sexuality and credibility are seen as mutually exclusive and how women have -- and haven't -- "gotten away with it." Ah, would that it were so.

Wurtzel is the Marisa Tomei of literature: a cute, bright girl who has invoked wrath not because she has the audacity to be unashamedly cute and bright, but because she plays up the cuteness (winsome waif on the cover of her first book, Prozac Nation; glammed out, topless and middle finger aloft on the cover of Bitch) while creating mediocre works that those less attractive, less connected or simply less lucky probably couldn't dream of seeing so richly rewarded. She's seen as someone who skates by, an ugly reminder that life isn't fair and success isn't based on merit. People play on her self-absorption and problematic personality, too, but talent tends to obviate those things. Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath were forgiven their trespasses (as are Philip Roth and the rest of the boys) because they wrote like motherfuckers. The dismissal of Miss Liz isn't unchangeable; all Wurtzel would have to do to shut everybody up is write a really great book. Unfortunately, she hasn't.

Bitch should have been subtitled "In Praise of the Semicolon." Instead of the brilliant treatise that would silence Wurtzel's detractors, it's a fury of lists, signifying little. Wurtzel confessed in Newsweek that she had a drug problem during the time that she was writing the book, and the speed clearly drives the text. It jitterbugs from one woman stranded on society's sexual barbed wire -- Courtney! Delilah! Lolita! Margaux! Hillary! -- to another, all rat-a-tat cultural citations interjected with moments of great craft and observation, then squeals off on some really looooong tangent that ends with a recitation of a commercial jingle or song lyric that confuses the point.

Hey, Liz, where you going with that gun in your hand? The women that Wurtzel ruminates about include, among others, Nicole Brown Simpson and Amy Fisher. Why? Is Amy Fisher anyone's idea of a "bitch"? She's a confused kid from Long Island with a felonious approach to resolving her inner conflicts. Wouldn't Aileen Wuornos make a more interesting "bitch"? She at least chose her targets correctly. She felt helpless at the hands of men, so she attacked men. Fisher felt helpless at the hands of one man, so she shot his wife. And what about Tonya Harding? Unfortunately, Wurtzel focuses almost entirely on bitches vis-a-vis men. Bitch-against-bitch isn't in her sights.

The reader gets so ground down by this book's poorly presented arguments and solipsism, one's own inner bitch is tempted to wield the lash, especially when Wurtzel's sharp prose ends up nullified by cattiness. When, in trying to point out that Hillary Clinton gets short shrift, she writes, "The First Lady earns less than her secretary...The First Lady earns less than you do. And she has thick calves," one wants to scream at the cover picture, "Damn, honey, no one's gonna confuse you with a beauty queen, either." Bitch begets bitchiness.

While supposedly celebrating women who call their own shots, to whatever effect, Wurtzel moans that the fate of a woman is to be at the mercy of the big bad man's world and her own biological clock. It doesn't quite work that way. Men may have the lion's share of the money and control, yet nonetheless they're extremely vulnerable to their desires. If it weren't so, the "femme fatale" would be archetype non grata.

Count on this book to raise some interesting issues, but don't expect any fresh or deep conclusions about them. I'm confident that Wurtzel has a great book in her, but she needs a forceful editor and all her wits about her to pull it off. Bitch is little more than occasional short puffs of fresh air in a long exercise in frustration for the reader (and, apparently, the writer). But I will grant her this: She has very pretty tits.

Karen Lehrman - New York Times Book Review

...one of the more honest, insightful and witty books on the subject of women to have come along in a while.

Kirkus Reviews

The epithet "bitch" has no male equivalent, and Wurtzel explains this inequity in a series of overgrown essays that swings from insightful to banal. At its best, Wurtzel's discursive style is akin to soapbox oratory. Studying women throughout history, from Delilah to Zelda Fitzgerald, who have gained influence by using their sexuality to manipulate men and events, Wurtzel points out that this path has often been "the only option" for women seeking "to be both powerful and sexy." But a woman who uses sex appeal to gain power is also likely to be dismissed, vilified, or, at the very least, labeled dangerous or difficult. But while there's some thoughtful analysis, a lot of entertaining information, and a good deal of clever writing, the book digresses too often from its central notion to persuade any but the already converted that the world can't handle difficult women. Indeed, it appears that what has proven most difficult for bitches has been handling their own power. Wurtzel identifies with their difficult choices and suffering and helps us empathize, yet her attitude toward the women she chooses to study often seems ambivalent. Expositions on desire, anger, sex, and madness figure throughout this serpentine analysis. Mostly her message gets bogged down in a tangle of bitching. As in her previous work, Prozac Nation (1994), Wurtzel generalizes from her own experience. To rephrase a Muriel Rukeyser poem she cites, the world would not split open if one woman told the truth about her life. "It would more likely derogate such `truth' by reducing it to no more than a silly girl's excessive emotionalism," Wurtzel writes, taking a preemptive strike at her detractors. At its worst, thebook becomes an extended defense of Wurtzel's own recalcitrant "bad" behavior. Wurtzel's talent for provocative prose and sexy subjects perfectly lends itself to a screed on female power that is refreshing and irritating by turns.