Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women by Elizabeth Wurtzel

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The Barnes & Noble Review
Bitch, Elizabeth Wurtzel's second book, was written over the course of a year in which she lived in four different apartments, three hotels, one seamy residential motel, and two houses. But the book is anything but transient. In luminescent prose, Wurtzel takes to task a double standard imposed on women: the cultural insistence on goodness and society's complete obsession with badness.

No one understands the desire to be bad more 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, and Bess Myerson), Wurtzel finds many biblical counterparts to the men and women in today's headlines. In five brilliant 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 ultimately an end in itself. Writing about the wife/mistress dichotomy, Wurtzel explains how some women are anointed wife material whileothersare relegated to the role of mistress.

Both celebratory and cautionary, Bitch catalogues some of the most infamous women in history, defending their outsize desires, describing their exquisite loneliness, and championing their take-no-prisoners approach to life and to love. Whether writing about Courtney Love, Sally Hemings, Bathsheba, Kimba Wood, Sharon Stone, or 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.

From the Publisher

Bitch is a 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 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? 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.

BUST Magazine

You've probably already heard all about this book, in which Elizabeth Wurtzel takes up the cause of the bitch, tracing her history from biblical times to modern day. But what you may not have heard is that the book is good....Even if you don't agree with Wurtzel's conclusions, I guarantee that you will never view news stories about women the same way again.

Library Journal

There is little praise for women in Wurtzel's hyperbolic rant about "bad girls" and their relationship to Western society. Indeed, hip turns of phrase frequently replace logic in this often smug and overwritten screed. In her defense, Wurtzel (Prozac Nation, LJ 8/94) has taken on a huge project, and every now and again she introduces a startling insight about how women manipulate situations to control their lives. Her look at the biblical tale of Samson and Delilah is particularly instructive in elucidating the history of our reaction to the alluringly repulsive femme fatale. Likewise, her presentation of both mythic and real women who flaunt their "pussy power" makes for provocative reading. Nonetheless, nearly a quarter of the book focuses on Nicole Brown Simpson (who few would call a "difficult woman") and is shockingly mean-spirited. While she lambastes the Simpson jury as "just plain stupid," we never learn how she knows what the jury did not: that O.J. killed Nicole. Since she was not in the courtroom, her cavalier dismissal of the verdict rankles and casts doubt on her other arguments. Worse, she seems to believe that violence is endemic to being "crazy in love," and her writing romanticizes the black eye and slapped cheek as proof of passionate involvement. In addition, Wurtzel completely ignores lesbiansan odd omission since the expression of Sapphic love represents a blatant rejection of "good girl" normsand dismisses the happily single, writing that "it would be easier to eliminate racism or end poverty or cure illiteracy or dethrone Fidel Castro than it would to make girls stop wanting to be brides." Recommended only as catalyst for debate. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/1/97.]Eleanor J. Bader, New School for Social Research, New York

Salon - Lily Burana

I was so hungry for this book. Bitch has been hyped as a text that would examine the way women are punished for misbehavior that would seem merely piquant in men, how female sexuality and credibility are seen as mutually exclusive and how women have -- and haven't -- "gotten away with it." Ah, would that it were so.

Wurtzel is the Marisa Tomei of literature: a cute, bright girl who has invoked wrath not because she has the audacity to be unashamedly cute and bright, but because she plays up the cuteness (winsome waif on the cover of her first book, Prozac Nation; glammed out, topless and middle finger aloft on the cover of Bitch) while creating mediocre works that those less attractive, less connected or simply less lucky probably couldn't dream of seeing so richly rewarded. She's seen as someone who skates by, an ugly reminder that life isn't fair and success isn't based on merit. People play on her self-absorption and problematic personality, too, but talent tends to obviate those things. Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath were forgiven their trespasses (as are Philip Roth and the rest of the boys) because they wrote like motherfuckers. The dismissal of Miss Liz isn't unchangeable; all Wurtzel would have to do to shut everybody up is write a really great book. Unfortunately, she hasn't.

Bitch should have been subtitled "In Praise of the Semicolon." Instead of the brilliant treatise that would silence Wurtzel's detractors, it's a fury of lists, signifying little. Wurtzel confessed in Newsweek that she had a drug problem during the time that she was writing the book, and the speed clearly drives the text. It jitterbugs from one woman stranded on society's sexual barbed wire -- Courtney! Delilah! Lolita! Margaux! Hillary! -- to another, all rat-a-tat cultural citations interjected with moments of great craft and observation, then squeals off on some really looooong tangent that ends with a recitation of a commercial jingle or song lyric that confuses the point.

Hey, Liz, where you going with that gun in your hand? The women that Wurtzel ruminates about include, among others, Nicole Brown Simpson and Amy Fisher. Why? Is Amy Fisher anyone's idea of a "bitch"? She's a confused kid from Long Island with a felonious approach to resolving her inner conflicts. Wouldn't Aileen Wuornos make a more interesting "bitch"? She at least chose her targets correctly. She felt helpless at the hands of men, so she attacked men. Fisher felt helpless at the hands of one man, so she shot his wife. And what about Tonya Harding? Unfortunately, Wurtzel focuses almost entirely on bitches vis-a-vis men. Bitch-against-bitch isn't in her sights.

The reader gets so ground down by this book's poorly presented arguments and solipsism, one's own inner bitch is tempted to wield the lash, especially when Wurtzel's sharp prose ends up nullified by cattiness. When, in trying to point out that Hillary Clinton gets short shrift, she writes, "The First Lady earns less than her secretary...The First Lady earns less than you do. And she has thick calves," one wants to scream at the cover picture, "Damn, honey, no one's gonna confuse you with a beauty queen, either." Bitch begets bitchiness.

While supposedly celebrating women who call their own shots, to whatever effect, Wurtzel moans that the fate of a woman is to be at the mercy of the big bad man's world and her own biological clock. It doesn't quite work that way. Men may have the lion's share of the money and control, yet nonetheless they're extremely vulnerable to their desires. If it weren't so, the "femme fatale" would be archetype non grata.

Count on this book to raise some interesting issues, but don't expect any fresh or deep conclusions about them. I'm confident that Wurtzel has a great book in her, but she needs a forceful editor and all her wits about her to pull it off. Bitch is little more than occasional short puffs of fresh air in a long exercise in frustration for the reader (and, apparently, the writer). But I will grant her this: She has very pretty tits.

New York Times Book Review - Karen Lehrman

...one of the more honest, insightful and witty books on the subject of women to have come along in a while.

Kirkus Reviews

The epithet "bitch" has no male equivalent, and Wurtzel explains this inequity in a series of overgrown essays that swings from insightful to banal. At its best, Wurtzel's discursive style is akin to soapbox oratory. Studying women throughout history, from Delilah to Zelda Fitzgerald, who have gained influence by using their sexuality to manipulate men and events, Wurtzel points out that this path has often been "the only option" for women seeking "to be both powerful and sexy." But a woman who uses sex appeal to gain power is also likely to be dismissed, vilified, or, at the very least, labeled dangerous or difficult. But while there's some thoughtful analysis, a lot of entertaining information, and a good deal of clever writing, the book digresses too often from its central notion to persuade any but the already converted that the world can't handle difficult women. Indeed, it appears that what has proven most difficult for bitches has been handling their own power. Wurtzel identifies with their difficult choices and suffering and helps us empathize, yet her attitude toward the women she chooses to study often seems ambivalent. Expositions on desire, anger, sex, and madness figure throughout this serpentine analysis. Mostly her message gets bogged down in a tangle of bitching. As in her previous work, Prozac Nation (1994), Wurtzel generalizes from her own experience. To rephrase a Muriel Rukeyser poem she cites, the world would not split open if one woman told the truth about her life. "It would more likely derogate such `truth' by reducing it to no more than a silly girl's excessive emotionalism," Wurtzel writes, taking a preemptive strike at her detractors. At its worst, thebook becomes an extended defense of Wurtzel's own recalcitrant "bad" behavior. Wurtzel's talent for provocative prose and sexy subjects perfectly lends itself to a screed on female power that is refreshing and irritating by turns.

Product Details

• Table of Contents
• Interviews & Essays
• Read an Excerpt

Table of Contents

Interviews & Essays

Elizabeth Wurtzel: Yes. I think so. I'm interested to see how this works, because I've read transcripts of all these other online chats where the answers and questions are eight lines apart, usually to really comical results. But I figure, if Cynthia Ozick can do this, it must not be very funny anymore.

Elizabeth Wurtzel: The Robert Altman movie "Nashville." I have always maintained that if you want to know everything you need to about what makes America what it is, all you need to do is read Norman Mailer's THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG and see Altman's "Nashville." It's hard to explain exactly why, but both those works cut into the dark heart of this country's soul. But "Nashville," simply from the point of view of being a great movie, is just so full, it's so huge, it tells all these stories of human frailty, set against this backdrop of politics and music and...everyone should just see it. I could go on for hours about it. Just trust me.

Elizabeth Wurtzel: If only I had any musical talent! My voice is so bad that if I sang "Michael Row the Boat Ashore" to you, you would have no idea what I was singing, or if I was even doing it in the English language. Nevertheless, I did learn to play guitar when I was 12 or thereabouts, and I could play "Michael Row the Boat Ashore" that way. Also, I think I mastered "Take It Easy," and this was when it was really uncool to be into the Eagles (kind of like now). But once I figured out that I was not going to be a big huge rock star (I could only envision my future in terms of big and huge, the thought of minor and cultlike did not interest me), I just abandoned the whole enterprise and stuck with writing, which I at least had some aptitude for. (I think.)

Elizabeth Wurtzel: Talk to Tina Brown!

Elizabeth Wurtzel: Did you see the movie "L.A. Confidential"? I only ask because one of the most interesting scenes in that movie had the cop who was Kim Basinger's boyfriend, and who had made it his life's work to break up fights between men beating up on women, the scene had him punch her in the eye. This was after he'd caught her in flagrante with his rival. After he threw this first punch at Ms. Basinger, he immediately backed off in shame because for him this was just the worst offense. But sitting in the audience, you're meant to understand that she "deserved" it -- not that anyone ever deserves to be physically injured, but she had knowingly done something to provoke him, and his response was understandable. The horrible thing about habitual wife-beaters is that they do what they do for no reason. All I was saying about Jackson Browne was that as far as anyone knows he has no history of abusing women, but I can imagine feeling so hurt and humiliated by that set of circumstances that all kinds of awful and unacceptable things happen that ought not leave him branded for life.

Elizabeth Wurtzel: Me.

Elizabeth Wurtzel: Believe it or not, I understand what she is saying. I myself have always been ambivalent about the cover. I really like it -- I mean, I wish I looked that good (amazing what they can do with shadow and lights), and I thought it was very fun, very rock and roll. But on the other hand, I worked very hard on this book, and it is supposed to have a serious message. And I have always feared and continue to worry that the cover gives people (reviewers, for instance) an excuse to not take the book seriously. Or to dismiss it outright. Now, as someone who grew up nourished much more by rock music than by anything else, I have always wanted to have my books look like albums, to shamelessly embrace the possibility of personality (could you imagine liking an album and not having a feeling for the person behind it?), and it bothers me that books are so remote to most people. I've always maintained that if this whole country stops reading, the publishing industry will have no one but itself to blame. I don't know why books need to seem inaccessible or humorless or unsexy to be serious, but that has usually been the case. I fully expect to get a lot of shit for the cover, but I hope it inspires other authors (and publishers) to be a bit more bold.

Elizabeth Wurtzel: I have no idea. I basically think that it would really help if women in other professions were more glamorous. I know it sounds unfair to complain that Janet Reno doesn't resemble a fashion model (although I suppose it would be fair to note that in most ways she does not resemble an attorney general either), but I sometimes think that one of the crimes of feminism has been to desex female role models. It used to be that movie stars were Lauren Bacall and Rita Hayworth and Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck -- all extremely fabulous and solid and strong. But now we seem to have this divide: Models carry the sex appeal and glamour quotient, while career women have to be really serious and straitlaced or else, even after all these years, they still are perceived as bimbos. Look, I am really glad to see that there are three women in Clinton's cabinet, but wouldn't it have been great if Kimba Wood -- a mother, a very sexy former Playboy bunny, and a federal judge -- had actually been made attorney general? Wouldn't it have been something if we had to worry that the President was chasing people other than volunteers and interns around the Oval Office desk? The only way to save us from the tyranny of Tyra and Naomi and Cindy and Christy is to allow women in other roles to be sexy too. Hence, my book cover, but that is another subject.

Elizabeth Wurtzel: I really hope that the Harper's piece was intended to be a satire of this type, which I think is fair enough, because depression has been so discussed and overdiscussed at this point. I have to say that Mr. Wallace is a ridiculously talented writer, and I urge everybody to take two weeks off from work and plow through the glory that is INFINITE JEST, but I don't think "The Depressed Person" was necessarily his finest hour. As far as women and depression go: I know of a couple of books being written by men right now that are memoirs of their depressions, so I suppose this will be the next special-interest group to come out of the closet. Personally, I think depression is ultimately a human issue more than anything else, and after I wrote PROZAC NATION I was astonished to find that the letters and other responses I got was as much if not more from men than from women. People are extremely lost and lonely and communityless and unhinged and unbound for any number of reasons that I could only get into in very short, trite terms in this format. I wrote BITCH because of a lot of the anger and horror I still felt about the way the world was that I could not have addressed in something so intimate as PROZAC NATION, and though it is about women's difficulties, I think ultimately it sees the world as we live in it now as no easier for men to navigate. I'm trying to get away from the topic of depression and move on to to the subject of optimism. I'm hopeful about the future. I mean, it's our world to invent -- don't you think?

Elizabeth Wurtzel: Thank you so much for having me. I guess this was not one of those chats where everyone inadvertently cuts each other off and all. This is much more civilized. I hope you will let me go back and correct grammar and spelling mistakes made in the interest of typing in "real time." Regarding BITCH, my book, I just want to say that I hope people who read it do enjoy it, and that they're able to take it in in the right spirit. It is frequently sloppy, and I think I probably contradict myself quite a bit, but this is a book that was written on the edge of my seat. I think I said somewhere that feminist writing has been so dry, and I want to make it wet again. Take that thought for what it's worth, but bear in mind that this is my credo, it's my personal attempt to scream loud enough that the world will be forced to listen: It's my personal attempt to be undeniable. If you find this -- or the idea of this -- just repulsive, you are not going to like this book at all. But if you enjoy such maniacal energy, you may well like it a lot, or even love it. That's all I could do when I worked on this book, and it's the best I have to offer -- in fact, this book is the very best I have to offer.

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