Prozac Nation

"While they like to talk everything through, to analyze and hypothesis, what I really need, what I'm really looking for, is not something I can articulate, It's nonverbal: I need love. I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on. And I know it's around me somewhere, but I just can't feel it."

"I'm never supposed to say, to Jack or anyone else, What makes you think I'm so rich that you can steal my heart and it won't mean a thing? Sometimes I wish I could walk around with a HANDLE WITH CARE sign stuck to my forehead."

"Story of my life: I am so self-destructive, I turn solutions into problems. Everything I touch, I ruin. I'm Midas in reverse."

This quote reminds me of the opening lines of a Relient K song. I'm sure pretty much everyone thinks they are retarded, but they really aren't too terrible. Especially considering that they're pretty Christian and I tend to thoroughly dislike what I dub "Jesus Music."
"Falling Out" - Relient K
"I'm falling out
Of grace with the world
They say I've lost my Midas touch
What turned to gold now turns to rust."

"And it took all the strength I could muster to purchase a ticket, get on board, get a seat, buy some magazines for the road even though I couldn't concentrate on anything at all. ... The only thing I could do was go blank. And I remember thinking: This is it, This is the pain you've been waiting for all your life. Heartbreak straight up. I remenber thinking things couldn't be worse."

"I have studiously tried to avoid ever using the word madness to describe my condition. Now and again, it slips out, but I hate it. Madness is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to most people who are losing their minds. That word is too exciting, too literary, too interesting in it's connotations, to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of depression."

On Sylvia Plath, in reference to madness/depression:
"Think, instead, of the girl herself, of the way she must have felt right then, of the way no amount of great poetry and fascination and fame could make the pain she felt at that moment worth suffering. Remember that when you're at the point at which you're doing something as desperate and violent as sticking your head in an oven, it is only because the life that preceded this act felt even worse. Think about living in depression from moment to moment, and know it is not worth any of the great art that comes as its by-product."

About her mother after a mugging:
"She's always been a trouper. She doesn't even like having a Demerol intravenous because she's one of those stoic antidrug people who aren't even comfortable taking aspirin for a headache. She's one of those people--bless their souls--who don't complete the Percodan or codeine prescriptions that they get after surgery. Can we possibly be related?"
(^I laughed a lot at that one.^)

There's a part where she's talking about her perfect suicide(lights out in a tub full of water, cutting), where she even talks about the music she'd like to listen to while she does it and it's a fantastic paragraph, but it's just that: A PARAGRAPH. So, I'll leave that out for the time-being.

"It's funny, but when I was little, before I'd go to sleep my mom would do this routine with me where she'd tell me to think of pretty things. ... Nothing all that extraordinary, but when you're four years old, it's cats and dogs that make life worth living. And I kind of think it's maybe not so different now."

"No one shoots himself in the head because he's had a bad fishing season or because the Wall Street Journal's editorial page says mean things about him. Depression strikes down deep. The fact that depression seems to be "in the air" right now can be both the cause and result of a level of societal malaise that so many feel. ... Every person who has experienced a severe depression has his own sad, awful tale to tell, his own mess to live through. Sadly, Kurt Cobain will never get that far. Every day, I thank God that I did."

The Epilogue and Afterword were far more profound to me than the whole rest of the book, but that was because they confirmed things that I had already guessed about depression. Mainly the fact that medications for depression are sometimes prescribed without good reason and our society is, in general, obsessed with not being okay. The memoir part of the book is also fantastic and I would definitely recommend it if you have the patience for a long and depressing book.
Out of 5 stars I'd give it about a 3.5


The sections in italics are, from what I've concluded, entries from her journals, while the rest was written for the sole-purpose of the book.