If you've read any of Elizabeth Wurtzel's work—particularly Prozac Nation, her grating, self-indulgent screed about wanting to stick her head in the oven whilst an undergraduate at Harvard—you are well acquainted with the author's tremendous suffering.

Now, writing for New York magazine's Intelligencer Wurtzel weighs in on the recent suicide of po-mo novelist David Foster Wallace. She knew him for a bit. And she hates to be all me-me-me about things, but this whole nasty business does remind her of her own terrible depression.

Here's Wurtzel on why she thought Wallace was a genius: "Maybe it was just the way he was so open and curious, or the way he was so taken with the silver lamé leotard I was wearing. "

And here's her acting coy about the actual nature of their relationship: "I could not tell you exactly what went down, but it seems perfectly possible to me that by the time we stopped talking in a terrible huff, there were involved many editors, agents, publishers/lawyers, guns, money/therapists, hospitals, ambulances."

(This is how things always are for Wurtzel. Magical happenings defy description. Or, at least they defy the type of comprehensible descriptions that regular, semi-literate, non-manic, non-genius types like you and me could ever understand. See the "accidental blowjob" incident in Prozac Nation for more!)

Ending her essay with a double dose of cynicism, Wurtzel writes: "[T]here is no happy ending to the story of sorrow if you are born with a predilection for despair. The world is, after all, a coarse and brutal and cruel place. It's only a matter of how long you can live with it."

It's a dark kicker, even for Wurtzel. (Not to mention ominous, given her own well-publicized struggle with depression.) Thankfully this flat, romanticized view of Wallace's demons is counteracted by pieces like A.O. Scott's. In this weekend's New York Times, Scott remembered Wallace as an effortlessly cool, extraordinarily gentle kind of guy who "illuminated the maze brilliantly, even if he couldn't show us the way out," (and who never once, as far as Scott is telling, saw him in a silver lamé leotard.)