'Prozac Nation' author Elizabeth Wurtzel dies at 52

Jan. 7 (UPI) -- Author Elizabeth Wurtzel died Tuesday following a battle with breast cancer, a family representative said. She was 52.

Wurtzel, best known for her 1994 memoir Prozac Nation, which described her experience with depression and substance abuse, died in a Manhattan hospital after cancer recently metastasized to her brain, her husband, Jim Freed, said.

"She put up a valiant fight and we admire her for that," a family spokeswoman told NBC News. "We deeply loved her and hope she rests in peace."

Prozac Nation kickstarted Wurtzel's career and sparked a conversation about clinical depression.

She followed up the memoir with a collection of essays titled Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women and another memoir More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction.

Wurtzel announced her breast cancer diagnosis in a 2015 op-ed in The Guardian in which she declared she was "early for history."

"I was on Prozac when it was still called fluoxetine. I wrote a twentynothing memoir when there was no such thing. I got addicted to snorting Ritalin before there was Adderall. I was a riot girl, I was a do-me feminist and I posed topless giving the world the finger on the cover of my second book."

She was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer stemming from the BRCA gene and advocated for Ashkenazi Jewish women to be tested for the mutation as they are 10 times more likely to be BRCA positive.

"I did not know I have the BRCA mutation. I did not know I would likely get breast cancer when I was still young, when the disease is a wild animal. I caught it fast and I acted fast, but I must have looked away: By the time of my double mastectomy, the cancer had spread to five lymph nodes," Wurtzel wrote in The New York Times.