Elizabeth Wurtzel Was a Great Writer and a Better Friend

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/08/opinion/elizabeth-wurtzel.html

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A few weeks ago, cleaning out my closet ahead of the new year, I found a skinny purple mohair scarf hand-knit for me by a friend in New York, the memoirist and essayist Elizabeth Wurtzel, who died on Tuesday. I wrapped the scarf around my pet, Frances, a black cat with green eyes identical to Lizzie’s cat Arabella, took a picture and texted it to her. “Remember this scarf?” I wrote.

Seconds later, a reply: “Yes!” I didn’t know it would be the last time I heard from her.

I wish I’d said something else while I had her attention. Like “I miss you,” which I did, having seen her only a handful of times since moving to Los Angeles three years ago. Or “How are you?” I’d been with her at the hospital in 2015, the day she went in for the biopsy that would end up confirming her breast cancer diagnosis.

And I’d known from another brief text exchange this past October that her cancer was back, that she was “just so sick of it.” I’d been trying to reach her about something unrelated, and when she hadn’t returned my calls in days, which was unlike her, I texted to see if she was mad at me for something I didn’t know about. “Not at all. Sorry,” she wrote. “Going through really difficult stuff with cancer. I would really like to talk to you. I miss you.”

I told her to call me whenever she was up for it, but she never did. And I didn’t push. So many calls had already gone unanswered. I let the scarf exchange stand because, as I’d discovered in recent years, maintaining a relationship with boundaries with Lizzie was the best way to have her in my life. Sometimes less was more. “I love you” or “I miss you, come visit” every month or so.

I first met Elizabeth Wurtzel on Sept. 24, 2013, when I visited her at her home in the West Village, an alley-facing garden apartment lousy with framed art and teetering stacks of vinyl records and CDs, empty boxes from one or another Sephora web order and all manner of Jonathan Adler objets d’art. I’d been assigned an article for Playboy magazine’s 60th anniversary issue — interviews with prominent women from entertainment and academia about the state of our sexual lives at that time. As a fan of Lizzie’s writing since discovering “Prozac Nation” as a freshman at New York University, I took this assignment as my chance to meet my idol. I was 24.

They say you shouldn’t do that, and I can understand why. But I’m grateful to have had the chance.

One thing to know about Lizzie, which won’t come as much of a surprise to anyone familiar with her work, is that she’d talk all day and into the night if you’d let her. She loved an audience. She loved to talk at you. She should have had a podcast. Instead, she had a pair of deep, purple suede couches and no bedtime and always plenty of petite sirah and plenty of opinions.

She could be quite persuasive. When we met for our interview for Playboy, to talk about sex and feminism, I’d recently moved in with my now ex-boyfriend, which had been conditional upon my sending my cat to live with my parents in California. Over Chinese takeout Lizzie convinced me that this wasn’t right, that a good man wouldn’t make me choose him over a pet. She loved animals. She said I should leave him.

She was at the time single and happy, living with a rescue dog, Augusta, who died a few years ago, and Arabella the cat who knocks everything over. Two months later, I broke up with my boyfriend — for the first time, and only briefly. I moved out of our shared apartment and stayed at Lizzie’s, cat-sitting and writing my article in my literary idol’s own home, while she was in Florida visiting family. It was surreal. I’d fantasized for years about running into her in Manhattan. And there I was, in her own bedsheets, under her low ceiling covered in butterfly stickers. She loved butterflies.

Lizzie’s enormous brown eyes were always leaking tears, giving the impression that the poster girl of adolescent depression was still crying after all these years — even though by the time I met her, she was in her late 40s, functionally medicated, writing the occasional essay, the capable caretaker of two rescue pets, as happy and mentally well as any writer of confession can be. She had chronic dry-eye.

She was also by this time clean from hard drugs, having written in a second memoir about her struggles with addiction. But she loved to open a bottle of red wine and listen to records and talk for hours, often offering unsolicited and highly questionable advice.

One Lizzie-ism I’ve only recently started to doubt, for in truth I probably could afford my own health insurance if I wasn’t buying Botox all the time: “Take care of the luxuries, and the necessities will take care of themselves.” She believed in ordering dessert on a Tuesday and opening another bottle late in the night. She believed in buying the things you love in triplicate when possible. She believed in Retin-A and wearing makeup to the bodega and taking regular private Pilates classes and owning many perfumes. She believed in asking for what you wanted.

Another Lizzie-ism: “If you want to make it as a writer, you have to be willing to kill your mother.” She did not mean this literally. She meant that you had to be willing to say the difficult and upsetting thing, to risk hurting someone’s feelings in the name of honesty, to not fear the fallout of living an authentic life and writing about it, warts and all.

She pushed me and taught me not to play it safe, that it’s only worth publishing if it’s true, specific and vulnerable. Because otherwise, why bother? Because you can’t please everyone, so you might as well please yourself. My most successful work is better for this advice, which echoes in my head always, but especially today.

After I moved to Los Angeles, I got sober from drugs and alcohol, and learned to set boundaries where previously there’d been none. That meant not getting sucked into her quicksand every time we spoke on the phone, which could last hours, or spent time together in person, which could go all night if you let it. Too often in the early part of our friendship, I’d leave her apartment feeling drained and vaguely resentful of the hold she had on me.

She was herself like drugs, absolutely intoxicating and capable of making you feel like the most important person on the planet. Leaving her presence often involved a sort of comedown. But the clothes were always great.

She always sent me home with a bag of her vintage hand-me-downs: pastel Tocca tank tops, a pink floral Agnès B. blouse. She was as generous as she was difficult, which is saying a lot. After our last visit, in November 2018, while I was in town on an extended layover en route to Morocco for another Playboy story, she gave me a graphite-colored silk dress by the British label Ghost, which now feels macabre. This time we drank seltzer water and fantasized about taking a road trip together to someplace warm, like Palm Springs or the California wine country, with me her designated driver. We spoke of this often, but never made a plan. I wonder if she knew it would never happen.

The second-to-last email she ever sent me contained the poem “Sorry” by Ntozake Shange. In the subject line she’d written “just sending this to you because I think you will love it.” The last email she sent me arrived over Thanksgiving, containing Saint Theresa’s prayer, which begins, “May today there be peace within.”

She could be tough, but she was incredibly sensitive. “I take everything personally,” she once told me. “If I ever stop taking things personally then I won’t care anywhere near as much.”

She cared deeply for her friends and the animals in her life, and was not above texting you out of the blue to let you know that you were “irreplaceable.” She was exhausted by the remission and recurrence of her cancer. Dismayed by our political situation. I can’t believe she won’t be here to see how it all ends. To write about it. The fact that she’s gone is so stupid. I want to call her up and talk about everything. She would find it all so annoying.

Molly Oswaks (@mollyoswaks) is a writer in Los Angeles.

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