All messed up and no place to go

For those of you who fell into a cultural coma some time in the mid-Nineties, Elizabeth Wurtzel is a rich, doe-eyed and depressed Jewish American Princess who wrote Prozac Nation, her account of what it was like to be a then-not-so-rich doe-eyed and depressed Jewish American Princess.

That book was fantastically well-written and fantastically self-indulgent. It was also fantastically successful - so successful that Hollywood has now made it into a film, starring Christina Ricci. (Its successor, Bitch, featured the lovely Lizzie starkers on the cover with breasts that looked as if they'd been unscrewed, air-brushed and stuck back in the wrong place by a cowboy builder, but that's another matter).

If you loved Prozac Nation, you'll love this follow-up. More, Now, Again finds Lizzie Wurtzel richer, more famous but no less depressed or doeeyed (though I hope for her sake she's done something about her breasts.) Truth be told, in MNA, Lizzie's so depressed that she's become addicted to Ritalin, an amphetamine-type drug usually given to children (and this case is no exception) who have poor attention spans. Anyway, Lizzie soon discovers that she gets a better buzz from her Ritalin by sticking it up her nose and by the time she runs out of pills she's got so accustomed to this nasty little habit that it seems only natural to try it with cocaine instead. And so she starts on the charlie. Ad infinitum, ad nauseam and all the rest of it.

All the stuff you'd expect is here: shrinks, rehab clinics, relationships with useless men, pregnancy, abortion, missed flights and lots of general f***ing-up. And that's all pretty compelling in its way, not least because Elizabeth Wurtzel is a very gifted writer. Melodramatic, self-absorbed, irritating beyond belief but yes, undoubtedly very gifted. So you read on because this is an immensely readable book.

And although it's not very elevating there's something to be said for Schadenfreude and it's here in bundles. God, she's successful, bloody hell she's pretty, jeez she's thin, but hallelujah, ain't the girl messed up and thank heaven for that.

Then a strange thing happens. After the first few chapters you begin feeling rather queasy and by the time you get halfway through you realise why. It's because there's something faintly obscene in all this intimacy, this great gush of self-revelation and neurosis, this emotional nose-bleed.

And it's not as if it's getting you anywhere. It's not as if it's helping to explain anything or making a difference to anything, because it isn't. You're just stuck in a rather desperate groundhog day of coke baggies and dope dealers and uneaten Chinese takeaways-You have become Elizabeth Wurtzel's dumping ground. You are the wheelie bin into which Elizabeth Wurtzel shakes out all her trash.

"I wanted to write about love and hope and sex and dreams," says Wurtzel on the cover of More, Now, Again, but the Lizzie Wurtzel in this book doesn't seem to have any love or hope or dreams. Leastwise not till right at the end, but by then you're so weighed down by the relentless narcissism of it all that it's hard to care.

Where will Wurtzel go from here? She's written the me-and-Prozac book, she's written the me-and-Ritalin book. What's next? The me-and-one-too-many aspirin book? The me-and-a-couple-of-antihistamines book?

The best we can hope for is that somewhere along the white lines, Wurtzel will have discovered the maturity to get over herself, honour her talent and write about something more important than Elizabeth Wurtzel.