Elizabeth Wurtzel.

Elizabeth Wurtzel, who came to prominence as an author before going to law school and forging a second career with Boies Schiller Flexner, died in Manhattan on Tuesday due to complications from metastatic breast cancer. She was 52. 

In 1994, at age 27, Wurtzel wrote "Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America." The book, a confessional memoir about her battle with depression as a college undergraduate, became a best-seller and was later adapted for the big screen. She published three more books, "Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women," "The Bitch Rules: Common Sense Advice for an Uncommon Life" and "More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction," before changing her focus to law in the mid-2000s.

Wurtzel earned a Yale Law School degree in 2008. Despite never obtaining a law license in New York, she went on to find work with one of the city's—and the country's—most prominent lawyers, David Boies. 

Wurtzel told Bloomberg in 2015 that her LSAT scores were not quite up to par, but her literary accomplishments stood out. Boies hired her in 2008, initially as an associate, after she sent him an email looking for a job.

The associate position ended by 2012, according to news reports, but Wurtzel continued to work with the firm as a case manager, and to praise Boies as a litigator and a boss. According to her LinkedIn profile, her current title was director of special operations. 

"There are things I bring to cases," she told Bloomberg in 2015, describing her role at the firm. "There are ways I can deal with clients that other people can't. I have a human touch that other lawyers don't have."

In a 2013 New York magazine article, she took stock of her life choices, and of the less glamorous aspects of legal work. "Most people who think they are practicing law are actually making binders," she wrote. "The binders from law firms go to a locker in a warehouse in a parking lot in an office park off an exit of a turnpike off a highway off an interstate in New Jersey, never to be looked at again. No one ever read them in the first place. But some client was billed for the hourly work."

Boies was unavailable for comment.

When Wurtzel married in 2015, Boies served as the officiant, according to The New York Times. By then she had already been diagnosed with cancer.