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Elizabeth Wurtzel and the Illusion of Gen-X Success - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/nyregion/elizabeth-wurtzel-gen-x.html

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In the early 1990s, when Elizabeth went from Harvard to The New Yorker to the outsize success of her first memoir, “Prozac Nation,’’ it was still reasonable to believe that the right combination of talent, drive and intellectual privilege would sustain a long, materially comfortable New York life in the arts, in publishing, in the academy. This was not merely youthful delusion; there were validating examples everywhere.

Book parties, then the center of literary social life, dependably provided them. Invariably, they were thrown at the large apartments of marginally older writers, editors, agents, humanities professors — people who managed to parlay an early interest in Willa Cather or the Franco-Prussian War into a bohemian affluence that seemed to operate at a level of cruise control.

The stressors now so palpably afflicting the creative class — how to pay for a child’s college education, or clarinet lessons, or a party without plastic cups — were nowhere in evidence. In the last decades of the 20th century, you were more likely to encounter a meerkat on West Broadway than a cash bar at a party for a hot first novel. It was easy to assume that real adulthood would take care of itself.

Technology changed everything, of course. Magazines disappeared; editorial contracts shrunk; streaming meant that writing for film or television was no longer likely to make you rich. Writing books was just going to make you poor. Fashion, once the purview of art, became the property of Instagram. All of these profound reversals crashed up against the hard metrics of the city’s soaring housing market.

In her new book, “Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis,’’ the writer Ada Calhoun delves into the professional and financial anxieties of women in their 40s and 50s, beginning with an account of her own challenges. Faced with the high cost of her family’s third-tier health care plan, the untenable nature of freelance life and mounting credit-card debt, she goes out looking for a “job-job,’’ only to find a teaching position for a six-week class that pays $600.

These dispiriting stories are everywhere.

Now in her 50s, she was living with her parents and working as a sales assistant at a J. Crew in a mall in New Jersey for minimum wage. She felt lucky.

After “Prozac Nation’’ sold many thousands of copies and was adapted into a movie, and after she followed up with two more memoirs, Elizabeth Wurtzel went to law school in her 30s. Along with so many others on the same path, she amassed debt doing it.