Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women | 
|  | | | Title: | Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women | | Author: | Elizabeth Wurtzel | | Publisher: | Anchor | | Type: | Book / Paperback | | Publication Date: | 18 May, 1999 | | ISBN / ISBN-13: | 0385484011 / 9780385484015 | | List Price: | $14.95 | | You Save: | $4.78 | | Amazon Price: | $10.17 | |
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| Editorial Review / Publisher's Information:
Product Description
No one better understands the desire to be bad than Elizabeth Wurtzel.
Bitch is a brilliant tract on the history of manipulative female behavior. By looking at women who derive their power from their sexuality, Wurtzel offers a trenchant cultural critique of contemporary gender relations. Beginning with Delilah, the first woman to supposedly bring a great man down (latter-day Delilahs include Yoko Ono, Pam Smart, Bess Myerson), Wurtzel finds many biblical counterparts to the men and women in today's headlines.
In five brilliant extended essays, she links the lives of women as demanding and disparate as Amy Fisher, Hillary Clinton, Margaux Hemingway, and Nicole Brown Simpson. Wurtzel gives voice to those women whose lives have been misunderstood, who have been dismissed for their beauty, their madness, their youth.
She finds in the story of Amy Fisher the tragic plight of all Lolitas, our thirst for their brief and intense flame. She connects Hemingway's tragic suicide to those of Sylvia Plath, Edie Sedgwick, and Marilyn Monroe, women whose beauty was an end, ultimately, in itself. Wurtzel, writing about the wife/mistress dichotomy, explains how some women are anointed as wife material, while others are relegated to the role of mistress. She takes to task the double standard imposed on women, the cultural insistence on goodness and society's complete obsession with badness: what's a girl to do? Let's face it, if women were any real threat to male power, "Gennifer Flowers would be sitting behind the desk of the Oval Office," writes Wurtzel, "and Bill Clinton would be a lounge singer in the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock."
Bitch tells a tale both celebratory and cautionary as Wurtzel catalogs some of the most infamous women in history, defending their outsize desires, describing their exquisite loneliness, championing their take-no-prisoners approach to life and to love. Whether writing about Courtney Love, Sally Hemings, Bathsheba, Kimba Wood, Sharon Stone, Princess Di--or waxing eloquent on the hideous success of The Rules, the evil that is The Bridges of Madison County, the twisted logic of You'll Never Make Love in This Town Again--Wurtzel is back with a bitchography that cuts to the core. In prose both blistering and brilliant, Bitch is a treatise on the nature of desperate sexual manipulation and a triumph of pussy power.
Amazon.com Review
Elizabeth Wurtzel, an ex-rock critic for The New Yorker, won controversial fame with her bestselling 1994 memoir Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America, which described how Prozac saved the precocious Harvard grad from suicide. Her second book, Bitch is a celebration of the defiant, rock & roll spirit of self-destructive women through the ages: Delilah, Amy Fisher, Princess Di, and hundreds more (including the awesomely reckless Wurtzel). There is no comprehensible central line of argument, perhaps because the author did her exhaustive research and writing on a speedy Kerouacesque drug binge that, by her own admission, sent her to rehab upon the book's conclusion. But Wurtzel has the remains of a fine mind: her insights are often sharp, sometimes bitchy, and always shameless as she zooms in a very few pages from The Oresteia to O.J. to her first crush on a fictional character (Heathcliff) to Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, Richard Pryor, Chrissie Hynde, Leaving Las Vegas, Gone with the Wind, Sylvia Plath's "Daddy," Schindler's List, Oliver!, Carousel, and Andrea Dworkin. Most pop culture pundits incline to grandiose blather, but Wurtzel is punchy, and her quotes are more often apt than pretentious. Bitch is like a Mr. Toad's Wild Ride in a library, with frequent rampages through the film and music archives. Like rock music, Wurtzel's prose style lives for the moment. She glories in breaking rules to bits, is never giddier than when she's saying something shocking, and apparently has no moral code except self-expression--with the attitude volume knob cranked up to 11. --Tim Appelo
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Customer Reviews:
• The Truth About Being A "bitch" 25 April, 2006
Everything that Elizabeth Wurtzel wrote in this book is true. The truth about how males can be so sexist, and how men are 'allowed' or supposed to do certian things, while women aren't. Elizabeth uses many examples of 'difficult women' in this book such as Dilea, Madonna, Amy Fisher and so on.
I am pretty sure that everyone has heard of phrases like, "Men can sleep with 10 women and thats fine. But if a women would sleep with 10 men she is a whore or a slut." And thats what many people believe to be true.
When guys are difficult and speak there mind they are 'just being a guy' but when a woman is difficlut or speaks her mind she gets classified as a bitch. And those are some of the things that she points out in her book. This is a very good book, but I wouldn't recommend it to people that have the minds set to the old fashioned ways or people that believe 'women are better off seen than heard'.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A1D5R4PZLQ1865
• A Fresh Take 03 December, 2008
I enjoyed this book mostly because I consider it a fresh take on the subject of feminism in the 20th century (when it was written, although it's certainly still applicable in the 21st). Her writing is raw and uncensored; I may not agree with everything said, but I appreciate her point of view. The reading was introspective and empowering. To those of you who criticize her for her beauty and ivy-league education: she never pretends to be anyone else, to have come from any other background, and why should she?
- Reviewed by customer ID: AA8U2UUA2P77M
• A Book That Seriously Disappointed Me 17 June, 2006
I have rarely been as disappointed with a book as I have been this one. In many ways Elizabeth Wurtzel is a brilliant writer, gifted with the ability to construct a memorable sentence or a brilliant image. Moreover, as a bit of a rebel and a very intelligent woman I would have imagined that this would have been a book bristling with insight. Besides, I liked the subtitle: In Praise of Difficult Women. My own thought has long been that the way our society is constructed, brilliant, independent women would often be taken by society at large as "difficult." I had imagined that this was going to have multiple overlaps with third wave feminism and perhaps the riot girrrls and all kinds of wonderful new ways of women asserting their rights to be whoever it is they want to be. Besides, she and I share very similar tastes in music and pop culture. I imagined a brilliant effort in gonzo feminism.
But I was disappointed. Yes, there were the brilliant turns of phrase and startling paragraphs. But like other reviewers, when I finished I really couldn't say what the book was about. The details were often marvelously expressed, but to what overall end? The book ended up being brilliant on the micro level, but dense and opaque on the macro. The result was a book that was fun to read from beginning to end, but frustrating because I was never able to grasp what it was all about.
The book is structured around five themes, each one with several women evoked to stand as icons, but in each case one woman above all others. The first part deals with sexual sirens who can also be conceived as man eaters, with Delilah, Samson's seductress/betrayal as the great example. The second part deals with under aged temptresses, with Amy Fisher as the great exemplar. The third section deals with women who died either by their own hand or by the kinds of lives they had come to live. Here several women are presented as icons, including Margaux Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Anne Sexton. The fourth section, written at the height of Monica-gate, skewers Hillary Clinton for being a wife instead of achieving great things herself (a secton that seems hopelessly out of touch with reality as she in 2006 looks poised to run for president--for the record, a move that I am passionately opposed to, since despite the hype she is extremely conservative on most issues, especially economics, and I think she would keep America on the right wing course upon which it began under Jimmy Carter--another person perceived to be liberal who was actually quite conservative on economic issues--and has continued under all successive presidents). The final section deals with women who are the victims of extreme violence and centers on Nicole Brown Simpson. The problem is that the book simply never coalesces around any substantive ideas.
In the end, the women she chooses to write about are women that are as difficult for feminism as for men or society or the public at large. Feminism simply can't absorb Amy Fisher and claim her for one of their own. The story is too tawdry and messy for that. But after three hundred pages of writing about these women, it still isn't clear what she is writing about. The big pay off never comes. It is a book that promises great--or even just pretty good--things but never delivers. This truly is a book that is far less than the sum of its parts. I think the fact that one can love many individual pages while hating it as a whole is reflected in the weirdly schizoid reviews that my Anchor Books edition contains (I have as of today the latest printing, so this may not be true of previous editions). The blurbs are divided into "The Good," "the Bad," "the Bitchy," and "The Bottom Line." The attempt on the part of the publishers almost seems an admission that it is a deeply flawed book, but they want to portray it as one of those ultra-controversial books that you have to read so that you can discuss.
I stil think there are some great books to be written about truly difficult women, about women that society has trouble absorbing or that it resists. I just in the end did not feel that this was one of them. This despite the fact that she writes well, that she is obviously a smart woman, and--let's admit it--very hot. Yes, that is her on the cover. Not many writers could pull that off.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A16QODENBJVUI1
• Bitching And Moaning 31 January, 2008
I was eager to read Bitch after having read Prozac Nation years before. I was sorely disappointed. Wurtzel rants and expounds on various maligned women throughout history. Her rambling can be hard to follow and I soon lost interest. This book had a lot of potential but Wurtzel just wasn't able to deliver.
I later read her memoir of drug addiction and recovery, More, Now, and Again which explained Bitch's dismal failure. It turns out that during the time Wurtzel was writing Bitch she was heavily using a myriad of drugs.
I suggest reading Prozac Nation and More, Now and Again (which are fabulous)and skipping Bitch. Read Manifesta and Grassroots for a modern perspective on feminism.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A1M7CUQR6WROR2
• Disjointed And Definitely Difficult 13 April, 2008
As a radical feminist, I was pathetically amused and enraged by this book. It does not celebrate women's strength or struggle, instead finding glory in the consolation prizes of temptress roles and the like. As a reader, I was intrigued but confused. It's easy to lose your place - the author is very clever but harder to stay with than a mechanical bull. I don't think any book i've ever read has given my facial muscles such a workout: i'm sure someone watching my expressions as I read would have been the more entertained of the group. Now that i've learned it was written during a drug binge, I understand it better and can get some sleep. We can do better.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A3PTC5MRS552UK
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