Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women by Elizabeth Wurtzel

Posting this here because fucking Pinterest won't let you go over 500 characters.

This is the first Elizabeth Wurtzel book I ever read - I think I was 15 or 16 at the time and obsessed with Courtney Love, Riot Grrrl and feminism. I hadn't even heard of Prozac Nation - that chapter of my life was to come later.

This book reminds me of a time of relative innocence in my life, but I always knew that I wasn't a typical good girl. I picked this book up because of Courtney Love but ended up by coming away with a different and better understanding of "femininity" and the type of woman I would probably grow up to be like. 

Wurtzel writes about Delilah, Amy Fisher, Hillary Clinton, Margaux Hemingway, Nicole Brown Simpson, Courtney Love, Sylvia Plath, Edie Sedgwick, Marilyn Monroe, and many more women whom I came to see as role models after reading this book. These are women who broke the mould and did everything for themselves. 

I still think that Elizabeth Wurtzel is one of the best and most important writers of the last 20 years; I'm not really sure what she's doing now but I'm prompted to find out. I know a lot of people don't like her (they think she's whiny or something? Try having clinical depression, we'll see how you like it), but she was a huge inspiration to me when I was a teenager. Her writing continues to be important to me and I'd say that this book is a very good introduction to her work.

I would say that the masculine counterpart to this book would be Rock Bottom: Dark Moments in Music Babylon by Pamela Des Barres, which I read around the same time as Bitch and can also highly recommend. Des Barres writes about Syd Barrett, Marc Bolan, John Bonham, Kurt Cobain, Eddie Cochran, Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye, Jimi Hendrix, Rick James, Brian Jones, Keith Moon, Jim Morrison, Ricky Nelson, Gram Parsons, Johnny Thunders, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Sid Vicious, Dennis Wilson, and most fascinatingly, G.G. Allin.