Literary It Girl Caroline Calloway joins Erin Hosier and Elizabeth Thompson to talk about her father's tragic suicide amidst her viral public shaming in 2019, her obsession with the late Prozac Nation memoirist and Gen X agent of chaos Elizabeth Wurtzel (who Erin knew well as EW's first assistant in 1999), and the generational legacies left by their unknowable fathers. In part two of the episode, Caroline interviews Erin about the making of Wurtzel's 2001 advice book, Radical Sanity -- which is also the inspiration for Caroline's latest. The three discuss the daddy issues complicated women inherit from complicated men.
"I just knew it was suicide. I felt it in my blood, and I knew. I knew he had it in his." -Caroline Calloway
Caroline tells us about the psychological demons that haunted her father, and what it was like to be told of his death two days after she had been publicly shamed in a viral piece for The Cut, I Was Caroline Calloway, in 2019.
In 1994, Elizabeth Wurtzel’s bestselling memoir Prozac Nation, about her depression in her 20s, helped usher in a new era of confessional writing that undoubtedly led to the culture of the overshare that makes up the very DNA of the millennial voice. Elizabeth would go on to publish a few books in rapid succession (Bitch, Radical Sanity and the addiction memoir More, Now, Again), before pivoting to attend law school at Yale in the early 2000s. At the time of her death of cancer at age 52 in 2020, Elizabeth had been working on a proposal for memoir she called Bastard, based on learning that the father who abandoned her during her childhood, Donald Wurtzel, was never her father in the first place. In fact, her father was the legendary photographer Bob Adelman, a family friend who lived down the block, but Wurtzel wasn’t told until after he died in 2016.
"I have spent my whole life driving people crazy. If you should not say it, I can't wait to scream it out the window. I am impossible. I never understood why I was so wild. I thought there was something wrong with me. Then I realized there is something right with me. Now I know I was born this way. I did not invent myself after all." -Elizabeth Wurtzel
Co-host Erin Hosier got to know Wurtzel beginning in 1999 when she worked with her during the publication of Radical Sanity: Commonsense Advice for Uncommon Women (also known as The Bitch Rules and Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Guide to Life) and More, Now, Again. The second half of this episode is dedicated to Caroline’s insatiable quest for more intel on the literary heroine who inspired her new book, Elizabeth Wurtzel & Caroline Calloway’s Guide to Life, a kind of hybrid biography, tribute and spinoff that acts as the only writing about Wurtzel that isn’t an obit.
We also answer the age old question, why doesn’t Elizabeth’s ex-boyfriend David Lipsky know how to pronounce her surname?
We loved meeting Caroline Calloway, and can’t help thinking Elizabeth Wurtzel would approve.
