Elizabeth Wurtzel: No Pain, No Gain

I meet Elizabeth Wurtzel – the so-called Sylvia Plath of the MTV generation, which is probably enough to make anybody want to run off and bury themselves in Bunty – at a London hotel. She is over here to promote her latest book, More, Now, Again, which is a sort of follow-up to her bestseller Prozac Nation. The first was an autobiographical account of teenage suicidal depression. This, though, is about blue skies and flowers and butterflies and hearing little birds tweet and how so very beautiful the world is. Only teasing. By turns tragic and tragic, it's about her cosmic drugs problem. And rehab. And relapse and more rehab. And abortion and shoplifting and self-mutilation and weeping all night and weeping all day and phoning the same man 24 times in an hour to check he still loves her and relapse and more rehab and working the phone to find a dealer right NOW! Honestly, has Bunty ever seemed more alluring? Certainly, I don't recall the three Marys ever working the phone to find a dealer right NOW! Or, if they did, they kept it very quiet.

She is late coming down from her room. When she does, she is rather glutinous and sticky with make-up, having already done breakfast telly. She is one of those spectacularly neurotic New Yorkers who have to have their coffee a certain way. You know, this much coffee, this much water, this much milk, at this temperature, then stirred anti-clockwise for three turns and then clockwise for two. "Shall we chance it?" she asks the waiter. He is up for it, but when the coffee arrives she takes a tiny sip then abandons it. Perhaps he foolishly skipped the anti-clockwise bit. She is 34 now, and still very pretty, in a girl-woman, misery-chic sort of way, with big brown eyes and an unmissable turquoise ring on one of her fingers. The ring is huge but her fingers are very tiny and bony. The ring is like an absurdly large, exotic fruit hanging on a fragile twig that maybe can't quite take its weight, and might crack and snap at any minute. She lights a cigarette and her hands, I note, shake quite a bit. Might she snap and crack at any minute? Or has she now done all the snapping and cracking she is ever going to do?

Whatever, by the time she joins us the photographer, the PR and I are well into a discussion about the Winter Olympics. Curling, with those little brooms? Couldn't it just as well be Light Housework on Ice? Although, that said, it's not quite up there with my favourite spectator sport of all time, synchronised swimming. Couldn't it just as well be Designer Drowning? At this point, Elizabeth asks a good question: "Why synchronised swimming?" And not, say, synchronised javelin? "Sure," she says. "Or synchronised smoking. Or synchronised shopping." Or, I suggest, synchronised mascara application? We like the sound of this last and think we might form a team, complete with rubber caps and fetching straps under the chin and everything. My only worries are:

1) Will the idea get past the IOC?

2)Will Elizabeth be any good at team games?

3) Will she pass the drugs test?

This last is mean, I know. Elizabeth has been clean since 28 October 1999. "Every addict remembers the date of their sobriety," she says. Clean, that is, of cocaine, heroin and Ritalin, a drug normally given to hyperactive children – "Trust me to get addicted to a drug for first-graders" – but prescribed in this instance to help her focus. She was meant to take one 10mg tablet three times a day but ended up taking 40 a day, carving them open and snorting the powder. She's clean of all that now, but is on a variety of other prescribed anti-depressants and the like. Which are? "Gaa-aaard," she says, which I think is New York for "God". "It's so humiliating to tell you. Before 11 September I was basically on a mood-stabiliser, a drug like Prozac, and an anxiety medication." And now? "Bigger doses of all those things, plus other things in addition." What other things? "It's humiliating. It's gonna sound like I go to a quack of a doctor. People think all this stuff is quackery, but you have no idea what condition I was in. When I think about how much medication I take, I think it's crazy, but I must remember how things were before."

Yes. And they were terrible. Have always been rather terrible. After all, she took her first overdose (of hay fever tablets) at 12. Some people, I know, find it hard to be sympathetic about any of this. Oh, poor, privately educated Elizabeth, they say. Poor little Elizabeth who wrote her first book (on parakeets) at six and, in spite of everything, went on to graduate from Harvard, win the Rolling Stone college journalism award and get a job as The New Yorker's pop critic. Poor, beautiful little Elizabeth who is, above all, Jewish, which is always the best thing to be because it means you always know someone who knows someone who can get you a discount. It's not like being a Holocaust survivor. It's not like witnessing genocide. Get a grip. Pull your socks up. But, the thing is, her writing, when it's good, is very, very good, can cut through anything, can mesmerisingly convey what it's like to become so severely unstitched that the business of everyday life – paying bills, having relationships, keeping normal hours – becomes an absolute impossibility. Yes, it's spectacularly self-obsessed. But isn't that in the nature of depression? Still, I can see the team spirit thing might prove a substantial issue.

I wonder, can she see beauty in life now? Can she hear the birds tweeting? "I always saw the beauty in things, and that was the heartbreak for me. It really was that I couldn't believe how beautiful the world was, and yet it seemed to have nothing to do with me." Always the observer, never the participant? "I don't know if that is ever going to go away. That's me. But all emotional pain is some version of that. All emotional pain is some version of: why can't I be part of it? I think it's worse to live though the Holocaust than, say, your parents' divorce, but depression is still pain." If that is pain, what is happiness, then? "I think it's an activity, not a feeling. You know, you can't think your way into acting but you can act your way into thinking. Addiction recovery is focused on your actions. The point is OK, you don't feel like getting out of bed, but if you do get out, you might feel glad that you did, and you'll never know you'll feel glad if you don't do it." Finally, have you discovered the things that make life worth living? "That's what I'm still figuring out, minute by minute." Isn't it knowing someone who knows someone who can get you a discount? "It's hard," she says, "for people to believe my family are Jewish because they have so few of the traits. You know, they drink too much and aren't very smart."

Of course, a lot goes back to her parents. Indeed, her parents seem so grossly dysfunctional that if they could be done for crimes against functionality, they'd go down for life. According to Wurtzel, her father, Donald, is a Valium addict who takes 12 times the normal daily dose. Her earliest memories are all about trying to wake him up, trying to prise his eyes open to notice her. Actually, now I think about it, the one thing that leaps out at you when you read her books is how much she depends on male attention. Indeed, in one rehab clinic she's given a citation for "excessive flirtation" and told off for treating the place like a pick-up joint. "Ah," she writes, "don't they understand that the whole world is my pick-up joint? Take away my drugs, and all that's left for me is men." Can she trace this particular addiction to prising her father's eyes open all those years ago? "I'm sure they are related," she says. "The whole time I was depressed, male attention certainly perked me up." And now? "This is a cliché, but after 11 September a lot of that did go away. There was someone who I liked and who liked me." Oh? "But I told him to leave me alone." I'm not sure if this is a first step toward long-lasting loving relationships. I'm not even sure what it has to do with 11 September. Except that, perhaps, she can see things only in terms of what they do to her interior life.

Her parents split when she was two, but carried on bickering horribly, bitterly, resentfully, loudly. Then Donald disappeared from her life when she was 14, only reappearing again last year when she asked him to come to one of her therapy sessions. "It was 25 April, 2001, a date I'll never forget because my life had been going so well. Then I saw him and wished I never had. It was horrible. He is horrible. I wanted to let him know I understood how things happened. I understood that given the way my mother is, he probably had to be out of my life. I wanted him to know I wasn't angry with him, that his conscience could be clear. And do you know what? It had never occurred to him that I might be mad at him anyway. His conscience is totally clear. He is horrible. He just makes me sick." Oh, dear. Even I'm starting to feel depressed now.

How, I ask, would you describe your mother, Lynne? "The first word that went though my mind was 'simple' but it's just wrong. I mean, she is so shut off. The way she makes the world work for her is deciding it's not going on." Is it true your mother has never read any of your books? "Yes." How do you account for that? "Well, she doesn't read." OK, but you'd think she'd want to read about what her daughter was going through, wouldn't you? "If she did she'd be a different person. What's funny is that she's always said she doesn't read my books because it would be too painful, but the fact is she doesn't read, period. It's not like an exceptional situation; the exceptional bit would be if she did read it. She is supportive. She lets me write in her apartment. But she hasn't read anything I've written. She can't handle it. She can't handle the truth."

I ask her if all this has put her off parenting herself. "No," she says. "I'm even kind of looking forward to it." In rehab, though, she had an affair with a drunk, got pregnant, and had an abortion. No, she says, she didn't consider for a minute keeping the baby. "For all my flights of fancy, I am basically sensible and it's not like I ever had this romantic idea of ah, the beautiful child. I had just gotten clean. It would have been absolutely a mistake. I'm sorry because in terms of life it was time, but in terms of being healthy it was not. I didn't have any sentimental fancy about it. I just thought: this is a huge mistake. I'm an idiot."

I'm not sure what is next for Elizabeth Wurtzel. Is she capable of taking her gift for writing and moving it on to other subjects, or has personal, mental pain become the sine qua non of her existence? What is next, Elizabeth? "I'm trying to decide what to do. Have you got any ideas?" How about caps on, mascaras ahoy, and smile, smile, smile? Actually, now I think about it, she could do worse. And has done.

'More, Now, Again' is published by Virago at £12.99