Elizabeth Wurtzel about women with power: 288k/15 sec. WAV audio file

Rhymes with witch

Wurtzel waxes powerful in 'Bitch'

(CNN) -- Who is Elizabeth Wurtzel, anyway?

In her first book, a memoir titled "Prozac Nation," the former music critic for "The New Yorker" and "New York" magazines spoke up for those fighting their own despair, dissecting for all the world to see her Sylvia Plath-like bouts with depression as she cascaded from Harvard into early womanhood.

And now, in her latest effort, Wurtzel has reinvented herself to stand for a new cause. "Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women" celebrates the women in history who have not been afraid to "scream, shout, race the engine, call when (they) feel like it and throw tantrums in Bloomingdale's" to get exactly what they want.

From Delilah to Madonna, from Anne Sexton to Courtney Love, Wurtzel argues difficult women should be applauded, not chastized, for being courageous enough to swing a powerful personality.

"The biggest problem that women have is being ambivalent about their own power," Wurtzel tells CNN. "We should be comfortable with the idea of wielding power. We shouldn't feel that it detracts from our femininity."

A book by its cover

"Bitch," like "Prozac Nation," is attracting a good deal of attention, both for its content and its title and cover, which is perhaps the most provocative of current hardbacks. It features Wurtzel sitting backwards in a chair, topless, the "I" in the title "Bitch" covered by her protruding middle finger.

Is this the image modern women want to propagate? Some women in the limelight answer with a resounding "yes."

"I'm learning that, actually, I should say 'thank you' when people use that word, because it's a compliment," actress Cybil Shepherd says. "It means I stood up for myself. It just happens that, because I'm a woman, I get called a bitch."

Actress Uma Thurman agrees.

"There's an active movement to turn it into a badge of honor," Thurman says.

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REVIEW

Read the Entertainment Weekly review of "Bitch"

The new rule

Wurtzel's reflection of this theory is garnering reviews that stretch across the board.

"The New York Times" says that while the book is "full of enormous contradictions, bizarre digressions and illogical outbursts, it is also one of the more honest, insightful and witty books on the subject of women to have come along in a while."

Entertainment Weekly claims "Bitch" prose is "seemingly untouched by editors, is windy, incessantly self-referential and packed with show-offy references," but adds, "It's also an extraordinarily thought-provoking, absorbing, wise, often poignant read."

Regardless, "Bitch" seems to play off two recent popular releases: "Bridget Jones's Diary", last year's British novel about the traumas plaguing a single, 30-something woman, and "The Rules", which gave women the power and go-ahead to manipulate their man.

But as Wurtzel writes, her book is a new alternative for women.

"Quite simply, the bitch role offers women the only option they have to be both powerful and sexy; all other representations of powerful women essentially come down to Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir."

CNN's Jill Brooke contributed to this article.

Related stories:

• "Bridget Jones's Diary" - February 9, 1998

Related sites:

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• "The Rules"
• Bantam Doubleday Dell

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