Elizabeth Wurtzel, famed young author of Prozac Nation, Bitch, and most recently More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction (Simon & Schuster), was in Boston for fewer than 48 hours earlier this week on her book tour, but somehow the mistress of distress managed to find herself in a wonderful tangle of compromising situations. Arriving 30 minutes late for a reading at the Kenmore Square Barnes & Noble, the skittish lanky blonde offered an excuse: "I’m really, riiiily ... rilly sorry. My hair got stuck in my necklace." A few minutes later, Wurtzel paused, mid-passage, to dab her nose with a white napkin. "Excuse me," she sniffed. The next day, Wurtzel’s publicist apologized that it might be hard to conduct an interview because the author was "coming down with the flu."

The curious necklace escapade, the delays, the darting eyes — consider it all delicious Bad Girl fodder for Wurtzel’s next self-indulgent literary soul-baring. The leggy, slim author, a pop-music critic for the New Yorker in the Robert Gottlieb era, is most famous for her 1997 book, Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America, to come out as a movie starring Christina Ricci later this year. To this day, the book speaks to a generation of angst-ridden young women, who — scowling, pouting, and self-consciously squirming — made up about 90 percent of the hundred or so attendees at Wurtzel’s recent reading. "I think of her as a friend," says Boston University senior Jennifer Natoli, who was there with her psychology class, titled "Racism, Sexism, Prejudice." "I wonder how she’s doing."

Apparently, not so well. More, Now, Again — dedicated, oddly, to Bruce Springsteen — is a tell-all account of a 40-pill-a-day Ritalin habit Wurtzel cultivated in the course of writing her 1999 book Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women. It is at once irritating and intoxicating, full of self-satisfied rants and publishing-world imbroglios. Most interesting is the segment in which Wurtzel camps out in the Doubleday offices to finish her book and has Chinese food and cocaine delivered in equal measure: "The dealers deliver coke to me in the lobby, and the security guards call me to come down and pick it up.... It’s like From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Or Eloise in corporate headquarters." (The book ends with her recovery, and she says she is still clean.)

The author once heralded as having her finger on the pulse of a generation appears to be desperately trying to hold onto it these days. Ultimately, her material — her own sexy, drug-addled failings — is at once so very late-1990s and hopelessly limited. "Wake up dead next time and you might have a book on your hands," quipped Peter Kurth, author of Isadora Duncan’s biography Isadora: A Sensational Life, in a Salon book review last month. "Everything about the book is déjà vu," wrote the Village Voice’s Joy Press. "Even the title has a weary ring to it."

Not young enough to be a prodigy, not old enough to be wise, Wurtzel seems to inhabit a literary void — floundering, flailing, and, yes, failing. More, Now, Again? More like enough. "This sort of self-centered, recovery thing has passed its moment," says Kurth, from his house in Vermont. "It seemed to me very dated and not especially revelatory."

Wurtzel protests that her critics don’t give her the license to misbehave that they grant to male authors. "I’m expected to be like Joyce Carol Oates, and I’m not behaving correctly," she says. "I’m not like Joyce Carol Oates; it’s not my personality. I guess I should go make rock and roll. But I don’t want to do that. I want to write books." In exasperation, Wurtzel finally resorts to a tack she’s honed in prose: whining. "My critics are asking, ‘Why is she writing another memoir?’ ... Lauren Slater is about to publish her third memoir. Will someone go give her some shit?"