Prozac Nation Read Online Free PDF

parents’ house. She’d gone to Cornell to be an architect, but her mother told her that all she could be was an architect’s
secretary,
so she majored in art history with that goal in mind. She’d spent a junior year abroad at the Sorbonne and did all the studiedly adventurous things a nice Jewish girl from Long Island can do in Paris—rented a motorbike wore a black cape, dated some nobleman type—but once she got out of college, she moved back home and was expected to stay there until she moved into her husband’s house. (Certainly there were many bolder women who defied this expectation who took efficiencies and railroad flats with girlfriends in the city who worked and dated and went to theater openings and lectures—but my mom was not one of them.) She took a job in the executive training program at Macy’s, and one day while she was riding the escalator up from the main floor to the mezzanine, she passed my father, who was riding down. They were wed less than a year later.
    My parents did weird things after they got married. My dad got a job at IBM and they moved to Poughkeepsie, where my mom went nuts with boredom and bought herself a pet monkey named Percy. Eventually she got pregnant with me, decided a baby was better than a monkey, and moved down to New York City because she could not bear another day in a town that was half Vassar College, half IBM. My father followed, I was born, they fought, they were miserable, he refused to get a college degree, they fought some more, and then one day I wouldn’t stop crying. My mom called my dad at work to say that if he didn’t come home immediately and figure out how to get me to calm down, she was going to defenestrate me. Whatever my father did when he got to the apartment must have worked, because I’m still alive today, but I think that moment marked the end of their marriage. Sometime after that, my parents were trying to hang a picture in the apartment, and my mom absolutely refused to hold the nail in place while he hammered it into the wall; she was sure he was going to misfire and bang her fingers, and she would end up bruised and broken. After that, they went to a marriage counselor they read about in
Time
magazine who made them play with toy trains to see how their relationship worked. Something about the way they put things together on the tracks made him conclude it was hopeless. My mom threw my dad out of the house, and he went home to his mother and his diabetic, alcoholic father in their cinder-block apartment complex in Brighton Beach, and that was the end.
    This marriage could have peacefully ceased to be one fine day with an understanding that it was just a mistake, they were just two foolish kids playing house. Problem was, they had a child, and for many years after they split up, I became the battlefield on which all their ideological differences were fought. This was New York City in the late sixties: Harlem had burned down, Columbia University was shut down, Central Park had become an international center of love-ins and be-ins and drug-ins, and my mom was petrified about being a single mother with a deadbeat ex-husband. She sent me to the synagogue nursery school, thinking this would provide me with some sense of community and stability, while my dad, who turned up to see me about once a week, would talk to me about atheism, insisting I eat lobster and ham and other nonkosher foods that I was taught were not allowed. A daily Valium doser, my dad would spend most of our Saturday afternoon visits sleeping, leaving me to watch TV or paint with watercolors or call my mom to say,
Daddy won’t move, I think he’s dead.
(One time we went to see
The Last Waltz,
and he passed out. I couldn’t get him to budge, so we sat through the movie three times; I think this might explain my abiding crush on Robbie Robertson.)
    For years, my mom tugged toward trying to give me a solid, middle-class, traditional