Prozac Nation, by Lauren Slater

This was another book from the summer reading lists. I just nabbed it from the YA section of the library because it looked short and speedy and marginally interesting. But in essence, it reaffirmed my already-pretty-concrete notion that no amount of evocative prose can rescue a sinking premise (illustrated at its height, perhaps, by Koren Zailckas' Smashed).

Basically, this is a memoir/diary--rather dated, at this point--of a woman with a history of mental illness who found the medication Prozac to be such a miracle cure that she was shocked at its efficacy. I know lots of people who suffer from varying forms of depression, some medicated and some not, but I think the perspective on medication has changed in the ten years since this book was published; Slater makes her connection to this medication a HUGE thing (and it really is, to the author; who am I to discount another's feelings? of course they're valid for her), whereas for most of the people I know, choosing medication (or not) is just one tiny first step of the puzzle. This whole book, which spans a decade, would today not merit much notice--again, because Prozac (and its friends with lesser side effects) have been around for more than two decades at this point. Hopefully some of the stigma and a bit of the mystery has been removed, but these issues are complex and the book doesn't really grapple with them. It's more about flashbacks to moments in Slater's life, though it never fulfills the reader's curiousity by telling her whole life story (there are hints of abuse, a not-mentioned-but-present father, etc).

The snippets in which her mother appears are rather interesting, personal history flashbacks--her mother was a forbidding, distant woman who clearly (though the author places no direct blame) is at fault for Slater being such a messed up kid. There's also no mention of her parents now that she's an adult. But what really made this book ineffective for me was its lack of scope and its basic jitteriness. Plus there's a disassociation and detachment between the writer and her reader that, while it bespeaks of her inaccesibility of self, also makes any connection really impossible for the average reader (such as myself!).

And for me, the greatness of a book almost always boils down to the distinction--and I can't remember where I heard this but I need to research it!--between "window" books and "mirror" books. The former show us windows to the world--even if they are about personal experience, or we seek to find and read something we can connect with, it can open a window to some new perspective. But every once in awhile, for comfort, we need "mirror" books, which just reflect back to us those pieces of ourselves we already know pretty well but find some comfort in reading about. This book is rather narrow and "mirror"y--even though I wasn't looking to relate, I was hoping to find more. I wanted to know what the choice to take medication really means to people. And I wanted a little more than a woman looking into her looking glass, and letting us read about it.