Prozac Nation author Elizabeth Wurtzel has breast cancer

Prozac Nation author Elizabeth Wurzel announced via a Vice piece that she’s been diagnosed with breast cancer. She wrote about her illness with her usual candor.

“I have the BRCA gene mutation, the curse of Ashkenazi Jews—and Angelina Jolie,” the 47-year-old writes. “It means I am likely to keep getting cancer if I don’t do something to stop it, so instead of having a lumpectomy, I am having a double mastectomy with reconstruction. It is quite amazing. They do both at the same time. You go in with breast cancer and come out with stripper b00bs.” Later in the piece she joked, “I always felt I was a 34D trapped in the body of a 34B. At long last.”

“Compared with being 26 and crazy and waiting for some guy to call, it’s not so bad,” she reasons. “If I can handle 39 breakups in 21 days, I can get through cancer. I’m not saying this because I’m a strong person or because I have a good attitude or anything like that—heaven knows, I believe in taking things badly and making a scene for no reason—but this is not bad.”

Wurtzel, who recently got a Yale law degree, has written extensively about her early battle with depression, her problems with love, and her mid-twenties battle with drug addiction, which she now describes as the most difficult thing that’s ever happened to her. Now, faced with cancer, she writes, “We are never so free as when we are running for our lives.”