From Amazon.com
When the author began taking Prozac in 1988 she was 26 and had already struggled for over a decade with hospitalizations, suicide attempts, anorexia, and self-mutilation resulting from a variety of mental illnesses, obsessive-compulsive disorder the most recent among them. The newly released drug liberated her from debilitating anxiety and pain even as it raised unsettling questions about her own identity, as she had always been defined by her afflictions. "The world as I had known it my whole life did not seem to exist," writes Slater in a characteristically incisive sentence. She was happier, but she found it difficult to write without the inner voices that had sparked her fevered creativity; even the philosophy books she had once loved now seemed irrelevant to her newly healthy state. With utter candor (even about her dampened sexuality) and a surprising amount of humor, Slater chronicles the ups and downs of life on Prozac. A nightmarish relapse when the dosage suddenly proves inadequate ("Prozac poop-out") ultimately helps her discover inner resources to combat her illness in conjunction with the medication. She finds new love and a better understanding of her past; she avoids the equally unrealistic extremes of Prozac boosters who ignore the drug's costs and doomsayers who depict it creating a generation of zombies. Slater's balanced final assessment is voiced, as usual, in exact, lyrical prose: "This is Prozac's burden and gift, keeping me alive to the most human of questions, bringing me forward, bringing me back, swaddling and unswaddling me, pushing me to ask which wrappings are real."
--Wendy Smith
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Publishers Weekly
In the final chapter of Welcome to My Country (1996), an account of her work with schizophrenic patients, psychologist Slater revealed that, she, too, had been institutionalized, and that she saw much of herself in those she counseled. Now she steps back to tell how fluoxetine hydrochloride (better known as Prozac) freed her from crippling obsessive-compulsive thoughts and suicidal impulses and allowed her to continue her education, have a career, fall in love and marry. The flipside to Elizabeth Wurtzel's brash, bratty rants, Slater's chronicle focuses not on her depressions ("At fifteen, right when my life should have been growing, it warbled and shrank to the size of a hard, black dot"), but on her long-term relationship with the drug, which she wryly characterizes as a dependency: "We all have our teats. We all suckle something or other." Earnestly reflective in the manner of the best YA fiction (complete with sections of journal entries, letters to her doctor and poems), Slater's is a sort of coming-of-age story, that of a woman who spent her teens and early '20s in a limbo of symptoms and institutions, and had to learn to enjoy life once returned to it. Whether she describes her first weeks on the drug ("the air felt like flannel on my skin"), the Prozac "Poop-out" and its attendant relapses or the vicissitudes of love and sex in her chemically altered state, Slater is frank, engaging and closely descriptive. Her worry that long-term use has diminished her creativity should be allayed by this luminous, cautiously optimistic memoir. Editor, Kate Medina; agent, Kimberly Witherspoon; author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
