'MORE, NOW, AGAIN': STRAIGHT TO REHAB

In 1994, Elizabeth Wurtzel's ''Prozac Nation'' -- a grating, gripping
memoir of her depression -- helped inaugurate the genre of
20-something autobiography and turned Wurtzel into a spokeswoman for
attractively anhedonic young women. But Wurtzel squandered that cache
with her follow-up, ''Bitch,'' a book intended to be a trenchant
''treatise on the nature of desperate sexual manipulation.'' It drew
attention mostly for its cover photo of Wurtzel, nude, with an
airbrushed nipple and a soft-focus middle finger extended toward the
reader.

Detractors of ''Bitch'' can be forgiven for barely bothering to read
the book -- it turns out that Wurtzel barely bothered to write it.
Her new memoir, ''More, Now, Again,'' describes the circumstances
surrounding the genesis of ''Bitch'': how Wurtzel sharpened her
concentration by snorting upwards of 40 crushed Ritalin tablets a
day, overcame writer's block with endless eightballs of cocaine,
dumped the resulting mess in her long-suffering editor's lap, checked
herself into rehab, then cleaned up her act, more or less. It's a
testament to the editor of ''Bitch'' that for all its flaws, it
didn't read like the gush you'd expect from a Ritalin addict and
cokehead. Oddly, ''More, Now, Again'' does.

Since the course of drug addiction gives most addiction memoirs a
certain relentless similarity (you fall from humanity, you claw your
way back, and in the interim you look a lot more like other addicts
than like yourself), what sets the best of them apart is their prose.
But Wurtzel, who tells us midway through this book that she just
might be the best nonfiction writer of her generation, either writes
badly on purpose or subscribes to the ''oh well, whatever'' school of
sentence construction. ''I don't actually roll my eyeballs, but I do
metaphorically'' is one line you'll find here.

Like all addicts, Wurtzel does some bad things -- shoplifting,
sleeping with married men, appearing on ''The O'Reilly Factor'' --
while stoned out of her mind, or sleepless from the same. Like all
narcissists, she suffers from a basic lack of empathy. ''I've never
been much interested in terrorism. It seems like someone else's
problem,'' she says of the Oklahoma bombing trial. ''The victims of
Timothy McVeigh start to really irritate me, and not for no reason.
Their bid for significance, their demands for closure, their need to
describe the goodness and innocence of the dead, their insistence on
filling air time with their compulsion for attention -- they don't
seem to understand that they are irrelevant.'' The book is so full of
strange, scattershot riffs like that one, written with such misplaced
glee, that there's no sense of distance between Wurtzel the writer
and Wurtzel the addict. No matter the subject, she clings to a mode
of self-congratulatory transgressiveness.

Relevance is in the eye of the beholder, but stoned or sober, Wurtzel
herself can be so selfish, so nasty and so pampered -- she checks
into $450-a-night hotel rooms on a whim, gives drug dealers her
publisher's FedEx account number and leans on friends so heavily that
they wind up more haggard than Wurtzel herself -- that even readers
who've gone through a similar hell may find it difficult to relate
Wurtzel's experiences to their own.

And since the worst thing that seems to have happened to Wurtzel as a
result of her addictions is that she alienated her publishing house
and jumped to a new one, what is there to relate to? The most
profound loss Wurtzel describes involves someone else -- her drug
buddy, the novelist Robert Bingham, who died in 1999. There's nothing
to prevent Wurtzel from presenting herself as proxy for Bingham's
inner demons, of course, but like much of her book, it's an
unpleasant, exploitative alignment. ''Rob and I are both desperate,''
Wurtzel writes. ''Everyone else around him is just decadent.'' But
the truth is that while Bingham may have been no more or less
desperate than the rest of us, he did apparently overdose on heroin
and isn't here to speak for himself. His silence is eloquent. For all
her sound and fury, you can't help thinking that Wurtzel never
touched the depths of addiction, and found little worth recording in
the shallows.

Alex Abramovich is a writer in New York.