The “breakdown” in the subtitle of Emily Witt’s haunting new book, “Health and Safety,” isn’t hers. It belongs to Andrew, her boyfriend of four years; he started behaving erratically when pandemic lockdowns in 2020 put an end to the underground party scene in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood, where Witt and Andrew had danced, done drugs and found friends.
But Witt also writes about a bigger breakdown, one that eroded the boundaries between their subculture and the world at large. “It was like we were a part of a big, safe bubble,” Witt recalls of the time before the pandemic. While American politics were getting meaner, she and her friends believed themselves “to be articulating a kind of new moral order,” full of care and concern for one another. It’s a lovely, earnest sentiment. But Witt, the author of “Future Sex” (2016), writes with such cool precision that it’s hard to imagine her fully losing herself in sentimental projects, even with chemical assistance. And a bubble, of course, is never safe for long.
“Health and Safety” braids together several narrative strands: the parties, the music and the drugs; Witt’s relationship with Andrew; and her work as a journalist during the Trump years, much of it for The New Yorker. Until she turned 31, Witt’s pills were sanctioned by prescription; she took Wellbutrin, which she liked because it treated her depression while keeping her skinny and productive.
When she stopped taking Wellbutrin, she embarked on a “course of study,” deciding “to try as many psychedelic drugs as possible.” In the spring of 2016, she met Andrew. They went to raves together, took drugs together and eventually moved in together. She was 35; Andrew was five years younger. They chose an open relationship. “A wedding now seemed like a dumb pageant,” she writes, “a false promise” promoting “a patriarchal model of family” that “was the lie of fascism.”
There’s a part of Witt that genuinely believes her own contempt. But another part of her recognizes that righteous sloganeering can’t fully account for the various gradations of what she feels. One of the things she loved about the music and the drugs is the way they opened up another space beyond language. The electronic sounds of techno “did not say what to feel or when to feel it,” she writes. “It had the discontinuity of poetry instead of the continuity of a story or a novel; it pursued a different order of sense-making.”
As a journalist, she has a professional responsibility to deliver facts, to tell a story, to describe what’s at stake. “But in every journalistic assignment there would be a parallel experience, the real one, which would have been far easier to write about but useless for the task of conveying information about the subject.” Sometimes getting blitzed on drugs had the perverse effect of making it easier to focus on what she needed to write; after sleeping off some “intense partying,” Witt would wake up “with a mind as clear as a sidewalk that has been hosed down in the morning.”
Witt writes so well about the parties and the drugs — meandering weekends of “polyintoxication”; pounding techno that shook loose her layers of consciousness and allowed her to enter “the nothing that I craved” — that I had no trouble imagining the experiences she had, and how meaningful they were for her. Her emotional connection to Andrew, though, is somewhat mystifying. Witt says she liked his cat, his Irish Spring soap, his Selsun blue shampoo. The second time they met, she cried after having sex, “because I knew that I could not live without him.” She was hopelessly in love: “He had colonized my very cells.”
As important as Andrew was for her, exactly what it was that made him such an enthralling presence is never quite conveyed. He is, for most of the book, a tall cipher who likes to party. Witt’s depiction of him gets clearer during his breakdown. Andrew begins to withdraw. He stops showering and loses interest in sex. He oscillates between eruptions of anger and being unresponsively stoned. He starts saying nasty things to her, insulting her politics, her work ethic, her writing, her dancing, her clothes.
“The person I knew was more self-aware than this,” she writes, after receiving one of his cruel texts. But having never been acquainted with this self-aware person, the reader gets to know only the Andrew who treats Witt terribly.
Witt, though, grows more self-aware; she is, by turns, disdainful, cleareyed, playful, serious, adventurous and terrified. Toward the end of “Health and Safety,” she stares down “middle-aged solitude.” She had always recoiled at anything “coded as female” — an internalized misogyny that allowed her to feel smugly superior to all the basic Brooklyn moms while also yearning for some of what they had.
It’s a testament to Witt’s skills as a writer that this book is enhanced, and not diminished, by her refusal to reconcile such contradictions. At one point, she describes a trip on mushrooms that helped her understand what she got out of her work: “The process of inquiry and observation was what gave my life meaning, even more than the attempts to put anything into words.”
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