Bless Sinners, Not Saints

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

For the cover of Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel's 1994 memoir of her struggle with depression, the author, then 26, posed strung out and exposing her midriff. The book sold well and established Wurtzel as a hipster social critic even though it dealt entirely with the subject of herself. Now, looking more self-possessed, Wurtzel graces the cover of her second book topless and giving the finger. Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women (Doubleday; 434 pages; $23.95) is, more or less, a meandering lamentation on the fate of irrepressible women, those too angry, too tormented, too selfish--those who, say, would prefer to see big pictures of themselves on book jackets when stock art would do. Unless such women tame themselves, Wurtzel bemoans, they wind up dying young. Or, one supposes, at the very least unmarriageable to nice fund managers.

If postfeminists Camille Paglia and Katie Roiphe have tried to persuade us that a woman's power lies in her sexuality, Wurtzel wants to inform those perhaps unfamiliar with the basic tenets of the women's movement that it isn't always thus. From Delilah to Anne Sexton to '70s supermodel Gia, she reminds us, seductive, complicated women haven't had an easy time of it.

Fortunately for Wurtzel, her book comes out at a moment when the culture seems painfully devoid of commanding female troublemakers. Courtney Love is now a chic model/actress, and Sharon Stone has married, in a big peony of a dress, a newspaper boss. We have no brazenly rapacious Barbara Stanwycks or Bette Davises; instead we have Monica Lewinskys and Ally McBeals, women just insecure and pesty. On the bright side, no one will ever make a career out of doing Calista Flockhart in drag.

While Wurtzel's plaint is heartfelt, it isn't more than that. The book is all shapeless feeling. Wurtzel complains that predatory Joey Buttafuoco, not Amy Fisher, should be in jail. She wishes Hillary Clinton were President. She thinks Glenn Close's character in Fatal Attraction was misunderstood: the woman was just true to her feelings (never mind that many women sleep with married men but don't start boiling pets).

Often Wurtzel's research doesn't seem to extend much beyond what she's read and reacted to in Esquire. Bitch, in fact, seems intended for people who let all their magazine subscriptions lapse in the late '80s and early '90s and never bothered to ask anyone what they missed. But then, only good girls spend their time in libraries.

--By Ginia Bellafante