Pop culture loves the hot mess: a female character – real or otherwise – hurtling from one improbable drama to the next. She is gregarious and overshares, she is narcissistic but magnetic. She has become a familiar trope in film and television, trolleying around with fag ash, drink spilling, hem riding up, and is almost always white.

It’s difficult to fathom then, that when Elizabeth Wurtzel published Prozac Nation in 1994, all this – women being unashamedly improper and full of irrepressible feeling – was still relatively uncharted, eyebrow-raising territory.

Wurtzel became famous by making a career from her emotions. “All I ever wanted to be was good,” she wrote, in her second memoir More, Now, Again in 2002. “And it’s all turned out so bad.”

It was a sad and cruel shock to learn last week that she had died of cancer at just 52, when she was still processing the impact of the illness on her life and writing a sequel to the book that made her a sensation at 27.

At 21, Wurtzel was one of the first patients to be prescribed Prozac and wrote in comical, luminescent prose about her multiple chemical dependencies – prescription or otherwise. She detailed the dark drag of depression that had engulfed her at the age of 10, prompted her first overdose at 11 and had her self-harming at 12.

Twenty-five years after she appalled and delighted critics, it can’t be overstated that the writers writing candidly about their mental health today owe a lot to Wurtzel’s disarming frankness. She shifted the dial on what young women writers were able to write, say and confess to, helping usher in what Slate magazine called “the first-person industrial complex”.

“Boys are one interest of mine that never really goes away, though to little avail,” she wrote in her first memoir. “None of the guys I go to school with notice me. I’m not even on their lists of alternatives after all the girls with names like Jennifer and Alison and Nicole don’t work out.”

But Wurtzel grew up beautiful and brainy; there was no shortage of men, love, sex and adventure for her to write about, often in graphic, navel-gazing detail.

In many ways, although entirely a product of Generation X, Wurtzel formed a template for all the caricatures that have been drawn for millennials: self-absorbed and hypersensitive. Yet, of course, she was intensely talented and clever; it didn’t preclude her from being a self-confessed nightmare at times – it was part of the legend of her life force. A book review in The New York Times famously described her as “Sylvia Plath with the ego of Madonna”, a line she delighted in and used as her Twitter bio. As she herself put it, Wurtzel was “early for history”.

Bookshops now groan under a mass of titles celebrating difficult women, reappraising lost feminist heroes or patronising readers with inane titles that insist YOU GOT THIS or GO GIRLBOSS.

Wurtzel didn’t necessarily invent the form – she remained unimpressed by a publishing phenomenon that now stretches beyond parody – but by publishing The Bitch Rules in 2000 (witty and caustic missives and essays she subtitled “common sense advice for an uncommon life”) she certainly foresaw it.

Growing up, I found Wurtzel irresistible. She – like me! – was a misfit. She thought too much and felt too much and – like me! – became a music journalist, confident that she could hold her own against the chin-stroking, plaid-shirted manboys that dominated the cultural discourse and dictated what did and didn’t constitute good taste.

I began what became a longstanding correspondence with Wurtzel in 2013, after she had attended Yale and retrained as a lawyer. I was keen to coax her back into writing, namely profiles for the Guardian, and there was an author I wanted her to meet. “I really am not practicing law full time at all,” she wrote in September of that year. “I mostly am writing, quite honestly. My boss lets me pretend to be a lawyer, which is nice of him.”

Prozac Nation made Wurtzel a voice and a target for an anxious generation. Photograph: AP

Wurtzel blew deadlines and was prone to drama, but she would always write with long, thoughtful paragraphs of whatever was on her mind, initially signing off “typos by iPhone” and later, after sending me a withering takedown of Hillary Clinton, “sent by my feminist iPhone”.

We managed to work on two pieces together in the end, one on her obsession with the TV show The Good Wife and another on her enduring love for Bob Dylan. But neither was really about all the things that made her long, elastic emails so intriguing at first, and later filled me with guilt for my much shorter replies thereafter.

Wurtzel was kind, curious and often maddening. She wanted to know about my love life, work life, what bands I saw and what books I was reading. “We all get better and sharper and smarter with age,” she wrote to me in the spring of 2014, “but we are never so keen and alive as when we are screaming to be heard.”

In 2015, the year she married the writer James Freed Jr, Wurtzel got cancer. “I have new breasts,” she wrote cheerily when I wrote to ask how she was doing. “I had my final surgery last month. So I am getting used to fake boobs. I happen to have loved my breasts — remember I posed topless on the cover of my book Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women, because how else to say that feminism is sexy and daring. But I love the new breasts I have now more. They are bigger than the ones I had before, and I always felt like a 34D trapped in the body of a 34B. So I am pleased.”

We carried on swapping stories and sending each other things to read. She wanted to discuss race and feminism and know more after reading a piece I commissioned on the concept of “misogynoir” – a specific prejudice faced by black women. She wanted to talk about her marriage, my divorce, about Trump and the myriad ways cancer kept surprising her.

In February 2017, she was reeling from learning that her father was the photographer Bob Adelman, a family friend her mother had an affair with, and not Donald Wurtzel, the man who left home when she was two. A man who she had spent an untold fortune on in therapy bills trying to work out her relationship with.

“I am finally writing another book,” she emailed. “It is a sequel to Prozac Nation. Actually it is the undoing of Prozac Nation. I have discovered the craziest things. It turns out there is so much I did not know. Actually, I got my whole life wrong, which was not my fault. So it is another book. I have been meaning to write a book for a while, but suddenly I have no choice. I am so overwhelmed by the things that have happened that I have to write. Which is kind of how it goes.”

I have discovered the craziest things. It turns out there is so much I did not know. Actually, I got my whole life wrong Elizabeth Wurtzel

A month later, she was set back by her health again. “Of all the healthcare crises I have encountered over the last couple of years, breaking my ankle is the most extraordinary. I cannot walk,” she wrote. “I am helpless in a world full of stairs. It is easier just to disengage. Cancer did not interfere with life this way. Cancer is a bigger idea, but if you don’t believe it’s a death sentence, which is never how I saw it, it is something you cope with. A broken ankle is a massive collision with everything every day, starting with getting out of bed.”

The writing went on hold and the cancer came back. Wurtzel refused pity or defeat and wrote: “I got breast cancer as a result of the BRCA gene, which is epidemic in Ashkenazi Jews. I should have known to be tested so that I could have taken steps to avoid getting breast cancer. I did not. I was stupid. If I have a recurrence and cancer kills me, that is my fault.”

By the summer last year our contact had become sporadic. Every few months rather than weeks, I’d hear from her or read her in New York magazine and the Daily Beast. Her last email, melancholic and brutally honest, came in July with the subject header: “Some thoughts on my marriage failing while being treated for advanced breast cancer.”

Wurtzel was still defiant about her prognosis, and so I still didn’t expect the worst.

“Marriage is an organizing principle,” she wrote. “It is flow. It is coffee in the morning. It is Game of Thrones at night. Maybe that’s all it is. That is a lot. Now I am an ombré mess of a person. I am missed appointments and cancelled meetings. I am the thing I forgot to do. I am held together by Drybar dry shampoo and micellar wipes.” It was the last time I emailed back.

Wurtzel on email

On New York, September 2013

Until a couple of years ago, I would have definitely said NYC was the most amazing and beautiful place in the world. But something rotten has happened or has hit this critical mass: it has become a city run on finance and capital exchange and not much else. I basically assume all the intellectuals have moved to LA by now. I’ve blocked out any other possibility. This city is apocalyptically plutocratic.

On men and female ambition, November 2013

I am left with a feeling that women just are not ambitious the way men are, and nothing will change that. I don’t mean that women are less ambitious, but this is a world men set up that women find absurd and not worth bothering with, so they give up. Women know there is no point in being a billionaire – no one needs that much money – so we are not willing to do the absurd things men do to get into that position. And there are other examples of the same thing at a lower scale. Women look at the silly world men have invented and decide it is not worth it, because it isn’t. I think asking women to change is not right; men and the world they have made, which is stupid and full of dumb hoops to jump through, are what need to change.

On love, December 2014

Love is a rare and special thing, and it happens only because the circumstances are perfect. Love requires serious moonlight.

On Trump, February 2017

This is a bad marriage. To have a president who is an emotional wreck is to be in an abusive relationship. We don’t want to think about it. It is not our problem. And yet it is driving us crazy. His itchy Twitter finger is making us nuts. His compulsion is getting us where we live. In the United States, the only demographic group that is falling out of the middle class is white Protestants. Trump voters. The American past. I am guessing they like what he is doing, this staccato undoing of America. Yes, this is what they voted for. In states where there is epidemic opioid addiction, they believe the problem is Muslims. Or Mexicans. Or China. Or abortion.