Elizabeth Wurtzel and the Illusion of Gen-X Success

A few years ago I got an email from Elizabeth Wurtzel telling me that her cancer had returned, and that it was advanced. Saying I was sorry would render precisely the wrong response, she let me know. Her illness didn’t scare her.

“I kind of like it,’’ she wrote. “I have been the most impossible person my whole life, and now I no longer have to make excuses. Now I’m just like, ‘I have cancer.’ And people are like, ‘By all means, ruin our lives. Wreck the house.’”

She was in touch to talk specifically about someone who seemed unwilling to hand her a sledgehammer. She had been living in an apartment in downtown Manhattan for a while, and now, she said, her landlord wanted her out.

By her own account, the place was in terrible shape. But he was planning to raise her rent 25 percent, unmoved, apparently, by the fact of her Stage 4 breast cancer, the disease that took her life this week, at the age of 52.

It was 2017 and the violence that had defined the city during her childhood on the Upper West Side had long since given way to the quieter cruelties born of greed rather than desperation.

I knew Elizabeth only in passing and not when she was young. What seemed striking was the disparity between her self-perception as an outlier — someone who had proudly refused to build a middle-aged life around the bourgeois goal posts of home-ownership, Viking appliances and managed investment accounts — and the reality of how elusive that kind of stability had become to a whole generation of her gifted, imaginative peers.

In the early 1990s, when Elizabeth went from Harvard to The New Yorker to the outsize success of her first memoir, “Prozac Nation,’’ it was still reasonable to believe that the right combination of talent, drive and intellectual privilege would sustain a long, materially comfortable New York life in the arts, in publishing, in the academy. This was not merely youthful delusion; there were validating examples everywhere.

Book parties, then the center of literary social life, dependably provided them. Invariably, they were thrown at the large apartments of marginally older writers, editors, agents, humanities professors — people who managed to parlay an early interest in Willa Cather or the Franco-Prussian War into a bohemian affluence that seemed to operate at a level of cruise control.

The stressors now so palpably afflicting the creative class — how to pay for a child’s college education, or clarinet lessons, or a party without plastic cups — were nowhere in evidence. In the last decades of the 20th century, you were more likely to encounter a meerkat on West Broadway than a cash bar at a party for a hot first novel. It was easy to assume that real adulthood would take care of itself.

Technology changed everything, of course. Magazines disappeared; editorial contracts shrunk; streaming meant that writing for film or television was no longer likely to make you rich. Writing books was just going to make you poor. Fashion, once the purview of art, became the property of Instagram. All of these profound reversals crashed up against the hard metrics of the city’s soaring housing market.

In her new book, “Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis,’’ the writer Ada Calhoun delves into the professional and financial anxieties of women in their 40s and 50s, beginning with an account of her own challenges. Faced with the high cost of her family’s third-tier health care plan, the untenable nature of freelance life and mounting credit-card debt, she goes out looking for a “job-job,’’ only to find a teaching position for a six-week class that pays $600.

These dispiriting stories are everywhere. Twenty years ago, fashion photography was narrative and the shoots that played out in magazines thick with pages were complex and beautifully cinematic. In this world, Olga Liriano was a star, first as a casting director and then producer.

Last month, she turned up as the focus of a piece in The New York Post about the declining fortunes of the city’s media class. In the intervening years, she held a series of high-paying jobs but lost the last of them, as a marketing executive at Nordstrom, in a restructuring in 2015.

Now in her 50s, she was living with her parents and working as a sales assistant at a J. Crew in a mall in New Jersey for minimum wage. She felt lucky.

After “Prozac Nation’’ sold many thousands of copies and was adapted into a movie, and after she followed up with two more memoirs, Elizabeth Wurtzel went to law school in her 30s. Along with so many others on the same path, she amassed debt doing it.

She worked for a time for David Boies, the prodigiously talented and controversial litigator. But anyone familiar with her writing would know that she was not cut out for the rigid calculation of billable hours. So with her degree she wrote — for newspapers and digital platforms.

Five years ago there was a book — “Creatocracy: How the Constitution Invented Hollywood,’’ that came and went with so little of the attention that had greeted her efforts years before. Like everyone else she had to hustle.

On the day that Elizabeth died, it happened that The Cut ran a piece about the kind of creative person who was now on top. Her name was Rachelle Hruska MacPherson. The wife of the hotelier Sean MacPherson, she started a company, Lingua Franca, which as the writer Marisa Meltzer deftly put it, is in the business of producing “the official cashmere of the resistance.”

Ms. Hruska MacPherson, who started way ahead by virtue of her marriage to a rich man, was now making it selling sweaters with airy political aphorisms — “The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted’’ — for hundreds of dollars each.

It all started just as you might suspect if you were asked to guess what sort of exercise in rank transactionalism would give birth to a line of Concerned Knitwear: Ms. Hruska MacPherson owed Anna Carter (the wife of Vanity Fair’s former editor Graydon Carter) a thank-you present for writing a preschool recommendation, so she sent her a sweater embroidered with the words: “I Miss Barack.”

I will miss you Elizabeth Wurtzel. Goodbye. May the afterlife spare you the Influencer.