Prozac Diary

By Lauren Slater

The author of the acclaimed Welcome to My Country describes in this provocative and funny memoir the ups and downs of living on Prozac for ten years, and the strange adjustments she had to make to living "normal life."
          
Today millions of people take Prozac, but Lauren Slater was one of the first. In this rich and beautifully written memoir, she describes what it's like to spend most of your life feeling crazy--and then to wake up one day and find yourself in the strange state of feeling well. And then to face the challenge of creating a whole new life. Once inhibited, Slater becomes spontaneous. Once terrified of maintaining a job, she accepts a teaching position and          ultimately earns several degrees in psychology. Once lonely, she finds love with a man who adores her. Slater is wonderfully thoughtful and articulate about all of these changes, and also about the downside of taking Prozac:  such matters as  dependency, sexual dysfunction, and Prozac "poop-out."
        
"The beauty of Lauren Slater's prose is shocking," said Newsday about Welcome to My Country, and Slater's remarkable gifts as a writer are present here in sentences that are like elegant darts, hitting at the center of the deepest human feelings. Prozac Diary is a wonderfully written report from inside a decade on Prozac, and an original writer's acute    observations on the challenges of living modern life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jun 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780679462798

Lauren Slater

Lauren Slater is the author of Welcome to My Country, Prozac Diary and Love Works Like This, and has written articles and contributed pieces to the New York Times, Harper's, Elle and Nerve. Her essays are widely anthologized and she is a frequent guest on US radio shows, including 'The People's Pharmacy' on NPR.

Reviews for Prozac Diary

[bookconcierge · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I couldn't stand this book. I only finished it because it was a book club selection.

[ghostwire_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Prozac Diary chronicles the life of 26-year-old Lauren Slater who became one of the first takers of a brand new drug, Prozac. She writes not so much about the actual drug (though she does talk about its side effects), but more about the consequences of shifting from an "illness-based "identity, to a "health-based" identity. Having dealt with mental illness for most of her life, this shift is both a welcome relief as well as well as a challenge - for who is she without the depression that's dominated her life? Slater describes her journey with humor, philosophical questions, and lyricism. However, like some memoirs about mental ilness, she does lapse into self-indulgence at times, but overall her writing is sensual, sharp, and often poetic. Engaging, candid, and occasionally briliant, Slater's book is an important contribution to the psychiatric memoir.