Some Women Try to Have It All. Elizabeth Wurtzel Has Nothing.
- New York Magazine
- Here she is contemplating her “one-night stand of a life”
In a time when countless articles are published arguing whether or not women can have it all, it seems like it should be refreshing that Elizabeth Wurtzel flat out admits that she doesn’t have it all. In fact, she writes in New York magazine that she has nothing—”no husband, no children, no real estate, no stocks, no bonds, no investments, no 401(k), no CDs, no IRAs, no emergency fund…no assets, no family.” What does Wurtzel have then? Well, she has a lot of names to drop. So, at least there’s that. She’ll always have that.
In the grand tradition of profoundly privileged women who just can’t pull it together and need rescuing over and over again but still want you to feel bad for them, Elizabeth Wurtzel took to the pages of New York magazine to complain about what a terrible time she’s having because of all the terrible decisions she’s been forced to make because she is a “free spirit” who “doesn’t know any other way to be.” Oh, to be a free spirit, to be pure at heart, to be the kind of person who “chooses pleasure over what is practical” and “goes to law school on a lark.” What would it be like to have that kind of freedom?
It sounds like it would be pretty excruciating, actually. It sounds like it might be just about the worst life ever, because even though Wurtzel has the luxury of frittering away her Wednesday mornings eating “paprika biscuits” in bed (which, gross, just think about all those brick-red crumbs in her sheets) with some random guy, she also complains that she is “so done with 2012. What a wretched year it was.” Aw. Poor Lizzie. What happened? Well, apparently, Wurtzel had the landlord from hell, a woman dubbed “Hooker Maria” whose animosity toward Wurtzel is explained away by the fact that Hooker Maria is old and jealous. This is just one instance where Wurtzel demeans other women on the basis of what they look like, which, is just about the quickest way to lose any credibility in my eyes. When Wurtzel calls two policewomen “fat,” she doesn’t help her argument that these cops were ineffective, she only proves that she isn’t imaginative enough to come up with better insults than a somewhat slow 3-year-old who missed his nap could.