Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women
by Elizabeth Wurtzel
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Book Summary Information
Author: Elizabeth WurtzelEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1999-05-18
ISBN: 0385484011
Number of pages: 448
Publisher: Anchor
Book Reviews of Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women
Book Review: Simply brilliant
Summary: 5 Stars
Wurtzel is a genius. Her writing is often tiring but almost always worth it. "Bitch" is her masterpiece, as far as I'm concerned. Everything in this book is worth it. Wurtzel addresses a subject most people would rather ignore. People might say she's complaining about something people with less time would ignore, the same way they criticized her for "Prozac Nation." Writing about an invented problem. But this book is about the undiscovered country of the female psyche versus the male psyche and what it means, how it affects our sex lives and relationships. How women have lost and when they try not to win but simply be equal, equal meaning having the ability to go after and try to get what they want and not apologize for it, they're criticized and not-tolerated, called a bitch or a whore or are ignored or fail even worse than they would've if they had just stayed silent (they could end up like Amy Fisher). Wurtzel offers advice. Advice that, quite simply, changed my life when I read it. The book is not for every reader. And people who criticize the style would probably also criticize a book like "On the Road" (which, Wurtzel would probably say, if a woman had written, would have been reduced to "a silly girl's excessive display of emotionalism," but since a man wrote it, it's a Great American Novel). Women destroy themselves to create themselves because this world and everything in it is not made for them. The only thing left to do is be shameless. This book should've started a revolution and it's not too late. It addresses exactly what all the feminist movements have failed to do... which is actually change people, not just laws and what it means to be politically correct. The way it was and is received is further proof of the problem she addresses.
Summary of Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women
No one better understands the desire to be bad than Elizabeth Wurtzel.Bitch is a brilliant tract on the history of manipulative female behavior. By looking at women who derive their power from their sexuality, Wurtzel offers a trenchant cultural critique of contemporary gender relations. Beginning with Delilah, the first woman to supposedly bring a great man down (latter-day Delilahs include Yoko Ono, Pam Smart, Bess Myerson), Wurtzel finds many biblical counterparts to the men and women in today's headlines.
In five brilliant extended essays, she links the lives of women as demanding and disparate as Amy Fisher, Hillary Clinton, Margaux Hemingway, and Nicole Brown Simpson. Wurtzel gives voice to those women whose lives have been misunderstood, who have been dismissed for their beauty, their madness, their youth.
She finds in the story of Amy Fisher the tragic plight of all Lolitas, our thirst for their brief and intense flame. She connects Hemingway's tragic suicide to those of Sylvia Plath, Edie Sedgwick, and Marilyn Monroe, women whose beauty was an end, ultimately, in itself. Wurtzel, writing about the wife/mistress dichotomy, explains how some women are anointed as wife material, while others are relegated to the role of mistress. She takes to task the double standard imposed on women, the cultural insistence on goodness and society's complete obsession with badness: what's a girl to do? Let's face it, if women were any real threat to male power, "Gennifer Flowers would be sitting behind the desk of the Oval Office," writes Wurtzel, "and Bill Clinton would be a lounge singer in the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock."
Bitch tells a tale both celebratory and cautionary as Wurtzel catalogs some of the most infamous women in history, defending their outsize desires, describing their exquisite loneliness, championing their take-no-prisoners approach to life and to love. Whether writing about Courtney Love, Sally Hemings, Bathsheba, Kimba Wood, Sharon Stone, Princess Di--or waxing eloquent on the hideous success of The Rules, the evil that is The Bridges of Madison County, the twisted logic of You'll Never Make Love in This Town Again--Wurtzel is back with a bitchography that cuts to the core. In prose both blistering and brilliant, Bitch is a treatise on the nature of desperate sexual manipulation and a triumph of pussy power.
Elizabeth Wurtzel, an ex-rock critic for The New Yorker, won controversial fame with her bestselling 1994 memoir Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America, which described how Prozac saved the precocious Harvard grad from suicide. Her second book, Bitch is a celebration of the defiant, rock & roll spirit of self-destructive women through the ages: Delilah, Amy Fisher, Princess Di, and hundreds more (including the awesomely reckless Wurtzel). There is no comprehensible central line of argument, perhaps because the author did her exhaustive research and writing on a speedy Kerouacesque drug binge that, by her own admission, sent her to rehab upon the book's conclusion. But Wurtzel has the remains of a fine mind: her insights are often sharp, sometimes bitchy, and always shameless as she zooms in a very few pages from The Oresteia to O.J. to her first crush on a fictional character (Heathcliff) to Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, Richard Pryor, Chrissie Hynde, Leaving Las Vegas, Gone with the Wind, Sylvia Plath's "Daddy," Schindler's List, Oliver!, Carousel, and Andrea Dworkin. Most pop culture pundits incline to grandiose blather, but Wurtzel is punchy, and her quotes are more often apt than pretentious. Bitch is like a Mr. Toad's Wild Ride in a library, with frequent rampages through the film and music archives. Like rock music, Wurtzel's prose style lives for the moment. She glories in breaking rules to bits, is never giddier than when she's saying something shocking, and apparently has no moral code except self-expression--with the attitude volume knob cranked up to 11. --Tim Appelo
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