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Overview
The author of the acclaimed Welcome to My Country describes in this provocative and funny memoir the ups and downs of living on Prozac for ten years, and the strange adjustments she had to make to living "normal life."Today millions of people take Prozac, but Lauren Slater was one of the first. In this rich and beautifully written memoir, she describes what it's like to spend most of your life feeling crazy--and then to wake up one day and find yourself in the strange state of feeling well. And then to face the challenge of creating a whole new life. Once inhibited, Slater becomes spontaneous. Once terrified of maintaining a job, she accepts a teaching position and ultimately earns several degrees in psychology. Once lonely, she finds love with a man who adores her. Slater is wonderfully thoughtful and articulate about all of these changes, and also about the downside of taking Prozac: such matters as dependency, sexual dysfunction, and Prozac "poop-out."
"The beauty of Lauren Slater's prose is shocking," said Newsday about Welcome to My Country, and Slater's remarkable gifts as a writer are present here in sentences that are like elegant darts, hitting at the center of the deepest human feelings. Prozac Diary is a wonderfully written report from inside a decade on Prozac, and an original writer's acute observations on the challenges of living modern life.
From the Hardcover edition.
"...elegantly written and told with specific, unforgettable details...Slater has taken Prozac for a decade and tells the ups, and downs, the drug provides."
Editorials
Biography
...[B]eautifully written...Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
[Slater] treats the drawbacks of Prozac with expressiveness. . . .what makes the book most worthwhile is her discussion of the subtler perils of Prozac. . . .her book. . .must surely be among the best ones available on the long-term effects of the drug. . .—New York Times
D. Max
...Slater is too capable an observer of her own psyche not to ask...what she may have lost....Does Prozac make you who you are or who you were never meant to be? For Slater...it's enough to bealmost and at lastwell. —The New York Times Book ReviewPeter Kurth
What are the actual chances of a seriously disturbed adolescent girl, prone to depression, eating disorders and self-mutilation, emerging after years of treatment and repeated psychiatric hospitalizations to become not only a doctor of psychology but a writer of the first rank, a woman whose work rises effortlessly to the top of the list of "recovery" memoirs that have flooded the market in recent years? Such a woman is Lauren Slater, whose new book, Prozac Diary, is as fine a chronicle of illness and regeneration as you will ever read. Slater writes like an angel, in a dreamy, joyously reflective narrative that remains both intensely personal and miraculously detached."How do you describe emptiness?" she asks. "Is it the air inside the bubble, the darkness in a pocket; snow? I think, yes, I was six, or seven when I first felt it, the dwindling that is depression ... Even back then, at the very beginning, I carried myself with a kind of confidence and verve, and I have yet to understand how energy can so easily co-exist with what is hollow." Prozac Diary is the record of Slater's 10 years on the wonder drug, first as a patient in clinical trials and later as a reluctant but inexorable convert to the miracle of psychotropics, with the attendant revelation that she is not, and never can be, wholly "herself" while swimming in a sea of chemicals. Slater was long attached to the comforts of being ill, the exemption sickness gave her from the experiences of ordinary life. There is "a loss" in rising to your feet, she says, in getting it all together, shopping for furniture and looking for lovers, houses and jobs.
"Much has been said about the meanings we make of illness," says Slater, "but what about the meanings we make out of cure? Cure is complex, disorienting, a re-visioning of the self, either subtle or stark. Cure is the new, strange planet, pressing in ... I was definitely a different person now, both more and less like me, a burgeoning mystery fulfilling one destiny while swerving from another." Along the way, Slater worries a lot about the potential loss of her "creativity" -- a baseless fear on the evidence of this book -- and about the spiritual diminishment that Prozac might cause in people whose deepest need is for meaning. Entertaining a lover, she wants him "just [to] lapse into senseless stanzas, into a jungle of useless beauty, and proclaim something smutty and gorgeous like, 'when I fuck you it's sliding into a satin slipper, only softer and honey to taste.'" Instead he tells her that "our whole world is comprised of only five basic properties -- hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, magnesium, zinc."
"And truly there is a kind of primitive poetry to that statement," Slater writes, "something rhythmic and essential." Her "shame about being drug-dependent is very American," her chemist boyfriend tells her. Still uneasy, she stays the course, likening Prozac to "Zen medicine" and slowly coming around to "Prozac's point of view, which posits god as a matter of molecules and witchcraft as a neural mishap." It could be that Prozac is "a conduit" to the essential self, Slater thinks, "a kind of psychotropic draino clearing the congestion so shine is visible." Her book, at least, is a perfect jewel, rinsed clean of dreck and psychobabble and pointing hopefully, cautiously, to the Brave New World. -- Salon