Eulogy Eulogy by Olivia Gagan by Olivia Gagan

Elizabeth Wurtzel Katherine Johnson 1967 2020 1918 2020

‘My rage is my retinue. “They were going to the moon, and I computed the path to get there.” My rage is a filthy velveteen train I drag around with me, carelessly. It is my ruby tiara. It is my rainbow and my pot of gold…. My rage is my conscience. I insist on my right to feel.’

Elizabeth Wurtzel was an American jour- usual in people, but I think it’s especially stage of her life in writing. The publication Katherine Johnson’s handwritten calcula- Johnson took just a year of classes before by hand the calculations for the spacecraft’s nalist, lawyer and writer, best known for unusual in women.’ And yet this was the of her second book, Bitch: In Praise of tions sent humans into space. She dreamt falling pregnant and starting a family with trajectory. He didn’t feel safe enough to Prozac Nation, her confessional memoir person who originally wanted the title of Difficult Women coincided with a spiral up schemes for missions to Mars and found her husband James Goble; she had three lift off until she had. Glenn’s mission was of growing up with chronic depression and Prozac Nation to be ‘I Hate Myself and I into cocaine and Ritalin addiction, which emergency paths home for astronauts in daughters. At the age of 35, she took a job a success and tipped the balance in favour being an early user of Prozac after the drug Want to Die’. became the stuff of her next work, More, orbit. Yet it took decades for her ground- as a mathematician at the National Advisory of the United States during its space race hit the U.S. market in 1987. Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction. breaking work to be recognised. Committee for Aeronautics (NACA)—which with the then-Soviet Union. NASA later Wurtzel’s inconsistencies made her hu- would eventually become NASA. Here, used Johnson’s mathematics to help put Born in New York City in 1967, Wurtzel man to some, a subject of ridicule to others. Her life was full of second, third and Johnson was born in White Sulphur Johnson worked in a segregated ‘pool’ of the first man on the moon during the Apollo went to Harvard at 18, by which point she She was acutely aware of her own con- fourth acts. At 39, she retrained as a law- Springs in West Virginia in 1918, the daugh- black women analysing flight data. Her life 11 mission. had already spent eight years grappling tradictions. She was furiously smart, yet yer, passing the New York State Bar in 2010 ter of a teacher and a lumberjack. Her un- changed when she was assigned to work as with what was later diagnosed as bipolar capable of wild moves. She blew a book and specialising in intellectual property usual mathematical abilities were evident part of the Space Task Group, which inves- Women were not credited for their work disorder. On graduating, she became pop advance on a Birkin bag. She stayed living law. At 47, she married for the first time. from a young age, and she was swiftly ush- tigated the possibility of humans going into in the early days of NASA, their names left critic for The New Yorker and New York in her apartment after a stalker repeatedly ered through elementary and secondary orbit. One day Johnson was given a tem- off of official papers. And when man finally Magazine, dated voraciously, and wrote showed up at her doorway. An unchanging theme was a yearning grades. By 14 she was in college, where porary job to assist the all-male research reached the moon, it was the astronauts what would become Prozac Nation. to understand her relationship with her she met a key teacher and mentor, W.W. team, ‘and they forgot to return me to the themselves who captured the public’s im- Prozac Nation inducted Wurtzel in a can- estranged father. Her first article was pub- Schieffelin Claytor, who was only the third pool,’ she later recalled. agination. It is only recently that Johnson’s Male tales of misspent youth are nothing on of young, unapologetic female writ- lished in Seventeen magazine when she African American in the US to hold a PhD work has been recognised and celebrated. In new. But Wurtzel’s chronicles of an angry ers who transmuted their pain into prose; was 16. It was about Donald Wurtzel, the in mathematics. Johnson’s calculations of possible paths 2015, US president Barack Obama awarded young woman wrestling with chronic grief only her book came out at a time when man she believed to be her parent. One of through space were all the more impressive her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the was met with both praise and widespread conversations around mental illness and her final articles was about him too—and Despite Johnson’s prodigious talents, she for having taken place largely before the highest civilian honour. A year later, in 2016, criticism when it was published in 1994. antidepressants in the U.S. were still in how she found out, in the twilight months was not expected to take them beyond advent of the electronic computer. Relying Hollywood biopic Hidden Figures told her their infancy. of her life, that he was not her father at all. the school gates. She graduated college instead on her brain, as did the other women story on film. Wurtzel felt her stories were worth tell- in 1937 and became a teacher in a black working at NASA, Johnson described the ing, a self-belief that led to outpourings Women documenting their sexual, emo- Wurtzel wrote to survive. ‘I was born with school in Virginia, where segregation was pool of women she worked with as ‘com- Yet, despite years of her employers, the of scorn and resentment from newspaper tional, psychological and pharmaceutical a mind that is compromised by preternat- still rampant. Two years later, Johnson puters who wore skirts.’ media, and the general public failing to book reviewers. ‘Sylvia Plath with the ego misadventures has since become a defin- ural unhappiness, and I might have died left her teaching job to attend West Vir- recognise her talents, Johnson never sought of Madonna,’ one critic sneered. Wurtzel ing Millennial genre. The success of Girls, very young or done very little,’ she later ginia University as a graduate student in As one of NASA’s first African-American external validation. She knew she could took it as a compliment. Fleabag and Animals all owe something wrote. ‘Instead, I made a career out of my mathematics, chosen as one of three black female scientists, Johnson’s pencil-and-pa- make things add up, that she could chart to Wurtzel, who found her audience, two emotions.’ students—and the only woman amongst per computations could make or break a celestial passages through space—and so She later said: ‘I’ve often felt like I don’t decades earlier, far less receptive. them—to integrate the school from its pre- mission. Just before the launch of one early she did. ‘I don’t have a feeling of inferiority,’ need anybody else to be on my side be- Elizabeth died in January 2020 of meta- vious all-white mandate. space orbit, astronaut John Glenn asked en- she once said, ‘—never had. I’m as good as cause I’m on my side. I do think that’s un- Nevertheless, she continued to chart each static breast cancer. She was 52. gineers ‘to get the girl’—Johnson—to verify anybody, but no better.’ PHOTOGRAPHY BY CATHERINE MCGANN /GETTY UK MCGANN CATHERINE BY PHOTOGRAPHY BOB NYE /NASA BY PHOTOGRAPHY