Ned Vizzini

Edison Price Vizzini, known as Ned Vizzini, was an American writer born on April 4, 1981, in Brooklyn, New York. He came of age in the 1990s and built his career early, first as a teenage essayist and then as a novelist for young readers. Vizzini grew up in Park Slope and attended Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, graduating in 1999. His characters and situations were said to be based on his time there, and school life became one of the main settings through which he wrote about pressure, self-consciousness, and the comedy and pain of adolescence.

Vizzini’s first published work was an essay for the New York Press about winning honorable mention at the 1996 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. As a freelance writer for the paper, he covered subjects ranging from family vacations to getting drunk in the street with other kids. That work led to an invitation to write a teen-focused article for The New York Times Magazine. In May 1998, his essay “Teen Angst? Nah!” appeared in The New York Times. Several of his New York Press columns later formed the core of his first book, Teen Angst? Naaah..., a memoir of his teenage years organized from junior high through high school and beyond.

After attending Hunter College in Manhattan, Vizzini published his first novel, Be More Chill, in 2004. The book follows Jeremy Heere, a high school student who gets a supercomputer pill in his brain that makes him cool. A New York Times Book Review notice said the novel was “so accurate that it should come with a warning,” and praised its painful humor. The book later became a musical with music and lyrics by Joe Iconis, premiering at New Jersey’s Two River Theatre in summer 2015, then opening Off-Broadway at the Signature Theater in New York three years later and transferring to Broadway the following February.

His best-known novel, It’s Kind of a Funny Story, was published in 2006. It was based on Vizzini’s own five-day stay in the psychiatric ward of Brooklyn’s Methodist Hospital. The novel tells the story of fifteen-year-old Craig Gilner, whose suicidal depression worsens during a demanding school year at Manhattan’s Executive Pre-Professional High School. NPR later placed the book at number 56 on its list of the “100 Best-Ever Teen Novels,” and it became the basis for a film of the same name. Vizzini continued writing across forms: The Other Normals appeared in 2012, and in 2013 he and filmmaker Chris Columbus published House of Secrets, which debuted on the New York Times bestseller list and stayed there for four weeks.

Vizzini also wrote for television. With Nick Antosca, he wrote two episodes of the 2012 season of MTV’s Teen Wolf, and the two were story editors on ABC’s 2013 drama Last Resort, where they were credited writers of the episode “Nuke It Out.” Beyond print and screen, Vizzini spoke at schools, libraries, and universities about mental health, writing, and how students could use writing as medicine for mental health. From 2006 to 2012, he facilitated a monthly writing workshop for local teenagers at a Park Slope Barnes & Noble.

Vizzini often spoke and wrote about severe clinical depression. He died by suicide in Brooklyn on December 19, 2013, at the age of 32. His books remain closely tied to the subjects he knew from experience: teenage anxiety, social pressure, depression, humor, and the need to say difficult things plainly. For readers who have felt isolated by school, illness, or their own thoughts, his writing can still feel direct, specific, and companionable.