Early on in her memoir, Health and Safety, Emily Witt – a staff writer at The New Yorker – has a profound epiphany while tripping on magic mushrooms. “The mushrooms had said a lot about writing,” she recalls. “It kept me apart from the world, and its demands for isolation made maintaining relationships difficult. I might not have anything important to say but the process of inquiry and observation was what gave my life meaning, even more than the attempts to put anything into words.”
Later, she meets Andrew, a lanky, long-haired raver at an ayahuasca ceremony, falling head-over-heels in love with him (“he had colonised my very cells,” she claims). As the pair make a life together in Brooklyn, Witt leaves behind her strict, controlled regimes of work and wellness and surrenders herself to love instead, and with it, extended, drug-fuelled benders in New York and Berlin.
Since 2018, Witt has been covering American politics, culture, sexuality, drugs, and nightlife for The New Yorker; her new memoir rolls all of the above into one book, blending the personal and political together to create a roving, first-person account of New York City’s underground dance music scene both before and after the pandemic; a time before Trump became president of the United States, and after; and the blossoming of a romantic relationship and its devastating breakdown. Alongside remarkably lucid accounts of parties and drug-taking, Witt recounts her first-hand experiences of political reporting for The New Yorker, fretting about the failure of journalism to capture any kind of authoritative truth. Witt’s previous book, Future Sex (2016), reported on progressive sex and sexuality in the age of the internet from a cool distance; in Health and Safety, she leans fully into the first person, offering a soul-searching, no-holds-barred account of how experiences, both personal and political, can shape us, for better or for worse.
Below, Emily Witt talks about rejecting convention, the empty promise of wellness culture, politics, and the state of journalism.
Violet Conroy: Why did you decide to write a memoir?
Emily Witt: I definitely didn’t set out to write a memoir. I was taking notes about my experimentation with drugs when I would go out because I wanted to remember things. In late 2019, I started to give myself some time to write it up and see if there was anything there. And then when the pandemic hit, I felt like, OK, now the New York that I was immersed in is over, a little scene is over. I want to write a book about it. And then the summer of 2020 happened, my relationship fell apart, everything happened politically in America over that summer, and it seemed like, by the end of that year, I had a beginning, middle and end to the story. That’s when I started to think of it as a real book.
VC: Are there any memoirs that have been particularly influential for you?
EW: Many of my favourite books are memoirs. I was thinking of a lot of the classics, obviously Joan Didion, Annie Ernaux, Guillaume Dustan. Dustan wrote a series of books in the 90s about his own life, and one of them is called I’m Going Out Tonight, which is an autoficitonal novella about just one night at the club. Because of the political moment [I lived through], I was interested in other moments of political change, so I was reading books like Natalia Ginzburg’s stories set in Italy during the war and David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives. I was thinking about books that are very personal, and describe a larger political reality through a very first-person narration.
VC: Tell me about the title: Health and Safety?
EW: I was grappling with [the idea of] whether a person can find health and safety by following the rules and living a conventional life. I stayed in a really negative situation because I was really committed to this idea of being a couple. I wanted to have the home and the family to a point where my commitment to this idea almost destroyed me. And I see that around me all the time, especially with women; I see women in really bad relationships because they’re so committed to the idea of the relationship and the prevailing notion that convention offers comfort and safety, which is, as I say in the book, the lie of fascism. But it’s very appealing.
“I see women in really bad relationships because they’re so committed to the idea of the relationship and the prevailing notion that convention offers comfort and safety, which is, as I say in the book, the lie of fascism” – Emily Witt
VC: Much of the book is about the push and pull between having romantic love or having independence and a career, and you write frequently about the dangers of “losing yourself to a man”. Do you think it’s possible to have both at the same time?
EW: I definitely do. With Future Sex, I’d always found the traditional monogamous partnership had been really elusive for me. I hadn’t been able to find a stable partner. I had boyfriends in my thirties, but maybe I wasn’t totally in love. And then I finally found somebody, and once you’re in what looks like a stable partnership, the whole world affirms it. Your parents are happy. You can talk about it with your co-workers. Everybody gets it. You have the plus one at the wedding. You feel so normal all of a sudden, whereas when you’re solo, you’re always thinking about how you’re outside of stuff. So to finally get that felt so good to me. But I was just in a bad relationship – I think there are good relationships [out there].
VC: You write about the judgement you receive from friends for taking drugs and partying. What kind of value did you see in these pursuits that others didn’t?
EW: For me, [taking drugs and partying] was as intellectually engaging of an experience as reading a great novel or seeing a great film. Like any experience like that, you come out with a slightly changed perspective. It throws you out of everyday life, and you get to come back to everyday life with a little bit of distance. That’s always been really appealing to me.
I was also really interested in the cultural history of psychedelics and the intellectual history of it. Obviously there’s nothing new about the psychedelic experience in human history, it’s been around for a long time, but LSD is relatively new, and psychedelic culture as it exists right now is relatively new. I’m always interested in what’s new and different, and also what’s badly written about, where it feels like there’s a huge gap between the available information and the experience of the thing.
VC: I was really struck by how the acts of raving and protesting are contrasted against the empty promises of wellness culture and consumerism in the book. Tell me more about that.
EW: The title Health and Safety is meant to be a little bit ironic. We’re in a world right now where we are poisoning our environment, we’re watching cities get bombed and destroyed, and then every day we’re told to wear SPF 50 or to make sure we’re getting enough magnesium. We think that these consumer choices can substitute for these huge structural problems that we all experience inside, I think, as tragedy and pain. So I think part of the appeal for doing drugs or any kind of risk-taking behaviour, is you feel more in line with like the world as it is, instead of this fake world.
And then when the pandemic hit, all this wellness talk was just so belied – at least here in America – by our total inability to prepare for that. Especially in the early months of the pandemic in New York, when something like 30,000 people died in three months … all this advice about how not to get cancer is just so inadequate to the fabric of reality right now. I think that’s part of being alive right now.
“We’re in a world right now where we are poisoning our environment, we’re watching cities get bombed and destroyed, and then every day we’re told to wear SPF 50 or to make sure we’re getting enough magnesium” – Emily Witt
VC: Health and Safety feels more personal than Future Sex; you write about your existential struggles with journalism, and that “the only way to make writing last in time is to make it emotional”. How did it feel to write in a more personal way?
EW: It was liberating to just let myself write in the first person. The writing of this book felt compulsive because I wasn’t exactly sure what had happened to me. It happened so quickly, the end of my relationship and what had happened in those four years. I was really battling with the idea that I had somehow engineered this disaster in my life by making bad choices, and I was litigating it so much in my mind anyway that writing felt like a relief. It felt like a way of really working out for myself what had happened and landing on a story of what had happened, especially because parts of my reality were denied to me, not just on a personal level, but with something like seeing the cops in New York City beat up a bunch of people and then hear the mayor on the radio the next day saying that it hadn’t happened. I felt this compulsion to write down what had happened because I thought it was being poorly depicted.
VC: As a staff writer at The New Yorker, what are your thoughts on the state of journalism today?
EW: The news cycle sped up so fast, and both as a journalist and as a reader, you’re producing and consuming news before it’s really had a chance to form. I was writing for The New Yorker’s website and the imperative was to be as fast as possible, so I felt like I couldn’t get a grasp on anything. It was kind of like: watch something, turn it into a story and pretend to have something authoritative to say about it, but I really didn’t. I was just as baffled as everybody else. So that was the crisis for me: I’m just putting panic and anxiety into the world without any understanding of its causes or what it means. That’s something I'm still grappling with.
For example, when I was writing about the high school shooting in Parkland, Florida and the immediate aftermath of that, it was very important to tell the story of what those kids were going through and feeling. But then it quickly turned into this sentimental spectacle that, in the book, I describe as the horror normalising machine. Something about that didn’t sit right with me. But all I could do was perpetuate it. In my work, I try to go one more analytical step into it and be a bit more critical. I’m considering the prevalent depiction of the thing, even as I’m depicting it.
Books written by journalists are often so much more meaningful than their daily correspondence. Maybe you just need more time. There’s something missing in our basic presentation of information. It feels like it doesn’t get to the heart of things.
Health and Safety: A Breakdown by Emily Witt is published by Pantheon, and is out now.
