In trying to see ahead of time if the library had a copy of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s most major work, Prozac Nation, I tapped into a new category for library books to be. Beyond merely “Available” or “Checked Out,” they could also, apparently, be labeled as: “Declared Lost.” What struck me about this status for a library book is that it inferred there was hope, among the library staff evidently, that the book would one day be found again. Like a missing sock or earring—maybe it would magically crop up when they least expected it. Or was it that, quite simply, the library was too cheap to bother with furnishing its branch with a new copy? Or, worse still, they didn’t find that Prozac Nation was a worthy enough literary addition to their collection. Maybe they were even happy to be rid of it. Weren’t there enough books in the library told from the perspective of “depressed” white people? Or, more accurately, white people making problems for themselves because they had no real ones. 

Some part of me had long believed that white people were, crudely enough, “jealous” of those who had actual problems. Of the sort that inherent privilege couldn’t solve. So they had to, in some way, steer the conversation back to themselves, make everything melodramatic. Enter: depression literature. A genre I had been a fan of ever since I could remember. It was only lately that I had started to romanticize it less, undoubtedly because it was no longer “à la mode.” That was to say, for a blanca to be “in love with her sadness” (as The Smashing Pumpkins would phrase it) was not something to be proud of anymore. Nor was it to idolize a woman such as Wurtzel. But I guess that still wasn’t stopping me. That’s why I had wanted to check the book out from the library in the first place: to see if it would “hold up” for me in the present. Or if it would make me cringe the way it did Michiko Kakutani when it first came out and she gave it the damning review that labeled Wurtzel as just another self-indulgent white girl who had the privilege of being self-indulgent. Maybe that’s what attracted me to the book. I could see my own self-indulgence in it. My own indolence. 

I remember from the first two pages alone, the dedication page (“For my mom, lovingly”) and the “quote page” (“Very early in my life it was too late” -Marguerite Duras), that this was the novel that was going to “speak to me.” And then she went and delivered the coup de grâce in securing my affections by titling the first chapter, “I Hate Myself and I Want to Die” (this, incidentally, is what she had wanted to call the book, but the publisher felt it would be “too much”). Never had I so instantaneously related to a novel without even reading the first chapter yet. And then I started to read and I could really relate to it, even though I read it so long after it was “relevant” or “avant-garde.” In truth, I think what I loved most about it was the “90s-ness” of it. Like Douglas Copeland’s Generation X. Both books had been shortened in common parlance from their original titles—Prozac Nation’s being Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America and Generation X’s being Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. It was bittersweet to look back at this time period and note how they could all see and feel the hollowness of everything (long before it all got even hollower), how existence on this planet had been distilled down to owning a bunch of shit. That was your value. For Wurtzel, it manifested in paragraphs like, “What I do feel is the scariness of being an adult, being alone in this big huge loft with so many CDs and plastic bags and magazines and pairs of dirty socks and dirty plates on the floor that I can’t even see the floor.” 

Of course, it’s easy to extrapolate from that same paragraph: “Poor me, I’m a rich white girl who lives in a big loft that I’ve got all to myself and I have all the material goods I could ask for.” Yet what no one wanted to (or wants to) understand about white people—and perhaps white girls in particular—is that to have such a void inside of you, to feel so fucking numb and soulless all the time was its own form of hell. Like a punishment designed to remind you of how undeserving you were of your good fortune, and that’s why it felt so meaningless and, ultimately, shitty. Constantly apologizing for your existence because it was so unjust and stupid to most others. Or rather, those who had been othered by society. But I knew it wasn’t “okay” to think like this, let alone say it aloud or use it as a reason to justify my enduring appreciation of Prozac Nation. One I couldn’t even confirm thanks to the goddamn library refusing to replace its lone “lost” copy. “Lost,” my ass. It was more likely that whoever had checked the book out simply wanted to hold on to it. Cling to it like the hallowed text it was for self-indulgent depressed people. After all, depression is the most self-indulgent kind of disease. That’s why white people are so often diagnosed with it. And, unlike “minorities” (a.k.a. ethnic groups that society has rendered as minorities), the cause of that depression isn’t as likely to be linked to economic hardship. It’s about a general dissatisfaction and self-loathing. Think Betty Draper in Mad Men. And even though no one wants to say it, maybe some of that stems from an inherited guilt about having oppression in one’s blood—regardless of whether they committed it “directly” or not. 

Continuing to stare in vague disbelief at the library’s online catalogue and its insistence on the status of Prozac Nation being “declared lost,” I also contemplated who actually declared it as such. The person who lost it? A librarian? A volunteer? Who gets to make the decision about whether or not something is truly lost? The same way a human can be…without ever actually being declared so. I knew that I was lost, and that so was Elizabeth Wurtzel; and that, in our shared lostness, we were connected even though we didn’t know one another, and even though she was dead now. But I couldn’t really say that about anyone I actually knew, no matter what their color was. So I bit the bullet (no suicide pun intended) and bought the book instead of trying to reread it for free. 

A few days later, after the book had arrived (obviously, few brick-and-mortar bookstores believe that Prozac Nation is still worth stocking), I lay on my bed reading it. The world outside was gray and rainy as I reencountered the familiar lines, “Pain or no, I would most likely walk around in a suicidal reverie the rest of my life, never actually doing anything about it. Was there a psychological term for that? Was there a disease that involved an intense desire to die, but no will to go through with it?” I guess the derogatory (by way of being sarcastic) term for it would be “self-aware white girl’s burden.” Or maybe, less harshly, “Status: Declared Lost.”