Prozac Nation at 20.

Books Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation turns twenty this year. For The Daily Beast, Nicolaus Mills offers this appreciation, which notes that those passages which some saw as its weakness were actually its strength:

"Anyone going through Prozac Nation can certainly find plenty of callow moments when Wurtzel does whine. Wurtzel’s mother gets mugged in New York, and Wurtzel is reluctant to leave Cambridge to be by her bedside. Wurtzel’s boyfriend goes home during Christmas vacation to be with his mother and sister, and Wurtzel, trying to avoid another breakdown, resents the attention he gives his family.

"But what reviewers who seize upon these moments as proof of Wurtzel’s fundamental callowness ignore is that in Prozac Nation she makes a point of deliberately parading her worst side. Her aim is to show her readers that her depression did not just make her unhappy. It often made her unfeeling and incapable of empathy."

Here's what happened when I read the book in 2003. I've since met someone who read that review and took it literally.