Of the $100,000, Penguin advanced Wurtzel $33,000 and sought interest of $7,500, claiming to have suffered detriment at Wurtzel's expense. The case was dismissed with prejudice in 2013. In early 2013, Wurtzel published a New York magazine article lamenting the unconventional choices she had made in life, including heroin use and spending much of a lucrative publisher advance on a costly Birkin bag, and her failure to marry, form a family, buy a house, save money or invest for retirement. "At long last, I had found myself vulnerable to the worst of New York City, because at 44 my life was not so different from the way it was at 24," she wrote. The article was widely criticized. In Slate, Amanda Marcotte called the piece Wurtzel's "latest word dump" and remarked that it was "as lengthy as it is incoherent." Writing in The New Republic, Noreen Malone said of the piece that "Wurtzel wants us to know that she's a mess, and kindly invites us to rubberneck." Prachi Gupta for Salon characterized the essay as "rambling" and "self-involved." In The New Yorker, Meghan Daum called the piece "self-aggrandizing, disjointed, and, in its most egregious moments, leaves the impression that her editors might have been egging her on—or worse, taking advantage of what sometimes looks like a fairly precarious psychological state—in order to ensure maximum blogospheric outrage." By contrast, in The New Yorker Jia Tolentino called the piece "one of the best things she ever wrote." In January 2015, Wurtzel published a short book titled Creatocracy under Thought Catalog's publishing imprint, TC Books. It is based on the thesis she wrote about intellectual property law upon graduation from Yale Law school. Personal life Wurtzel met photo editor and aspiring novelist James Freed Jr. in October 2013 at an addiction-themed reading. They became engaged in September 2014 and married in May 2015, while she was undergoing therapy. The couple later separated, but remained close. They completed their divorce papers, but never filed them; they were still married when she died. In a 2018 article in The Cut, Wurtzel wrote that she discovered in 2016 that her biological father was photographer Bob Adelman, who had worked with her mother in the 1960s. As a result, she labeled herself a bastard. Illness and death In February 2015, Wurtzel announced she had breast cancer, "which like many things that happen to women is mostly a