Health and Safety: A Breakdown, by Emily Witt (Penguin Random House, 176 pp., $19)
Progressivism is a mental disorder—that, at any rate, is the verdict one is tempted to reach upon finishing Emily Witt’s striking new memoir, Health and Safety: A Breakdown.
Witt is a reporter for The New Yorker. She lives in Brooklyn. Somehow, she is even more progressive than these facts suggest. Witt probably didn’t set out to write a book that depicts her hard-left mindset as a destructive psychological condition, to be avoided at all costs. Fortunately for her, as well as for readers of every political stripe, that is not all she has done. Combining honesty and talent, she has produced something far more valuable than a partisan screed. A loss of ideological control is the price she has paid to create a worthy chronicle.
Witt’s narrative runs from the presidential campaign of 2016 to the pandemic and collective hysteria of 2020. A disorienting period for most everyone, it is for her a time of extravagant listlessness, followed by disintegration. In this story, four things happen. One: Witt dances at bars, nightclubs, and music festivals, often for 12 hours at a stretch. Two: she ingests astounding quantities of drugs. Three: she staggers through a putrid relationship with a boyfriend. Four: she struggles to cope with the bewildering and debilitating set of contradictory opinions she holds about herself and the world.
Some of the dance parties are more legal than others. Most occur in basements or warehouses. The best ones go on for days. To an outsider, each new rave is just another indistinguishable mélange of DJs and techno, lasers and fog machines, sweat and indiscretion. But Witt parses the distinctions between the various spots, scenes, and happenings—they have names like Sustain, Fourth World, Club Night Club, UNTER High Tea, and Meta Ta Physika—with the eye of a connoisseur. She masters the “geography of nightlife.” Witt recounts her benders in such immersive detail that, like someone who was there, you lose track of time. She dances to find community, to feel authentic, and to encounter transcendence. She succeeds on all fronts—up to a point. She is candid enough not to conceal the many sordid aspects of the experience. At most clubs, “the toilet stalls were like clown cars, friends all going in at the same time to take drugs, take turns peeing, and complete sex acts.”
The drugs! Who knew you could take so many drugs? On a not-atypical occasion, Witt devours coke, GHB, alcohol, ketamine, and an unidentified crushed-up pill in the space of a few hours. One night “was like so many other nights: a line of cocaine when the acid became too rangy . . . ; weed to turn the acid back up again; beers to take the edge off.” Witt’s “polyintoxication” frequently tosses her down a well. “The sun was out now. It was nine or ten in the morning on a Sunday in mid-September. I was lost in a corridor with no walls. I tried to remember what drug I had taken. Was I on ayahuasca?” In her and in others, substance abuse evokes a chaotic mix of oblivion and agony. The drugs can produce sublime feelings of ego dissolution, or cause panic attacks and nightmares.
Witt’s relationship with a man we know only as “Andrew” is a disaster worthy of anthropological study. What does she see in this person? When we meet him, he lives in a “dingy first-floor apartment” with a “cigarette-burned IKEA couch.” He is an unrepentant stoner, who parties even harder than Witt does. He’s uninterested in having kids; he just wants to play with his music equipment. He gives Witt chlamydia. Witt’s puppy love for this juvenile 30-something never makes sense—not at the end, not at the beginning. Andrew is plainly still a child, and Witt lets him act like one, and the two call it freedom, an escape from “gendered traditions” and a discovery of “new forms of commitment.” Sit down for this: they do not, in fact, escape gender or reinvent commitment. Their proud pledge of nonmonogamy quickly devolves into a game of cheating tit-for-tat. By the end, Andrew is urinating on Witt’s furniture.
Andrew is despicable, but he is who he is—obviously so, and at first sight. Witt has set herself up to fail. She is attracted to this man, it would seem—and he to her—only because her attitude toward love and marriage is deranged. She writes: “I could not believe the lie that if I mimicked the patriarchal model of family, I would receive comfort and safety in exchange. That was the lie of fascism.” What functional male would touch this? Witt briefly flirts with the idea that having a child with Andrew (of all people) would be a healthy decision. “The state of the world wouldn’t matter,” she reflects, “if I had him and we had a child to pour our love into together.” She says this as though she’s hit on a deep secret about domestic life. In any case, the moment passes. Witt spurns the benevolence of hearth and home and is then offended to find that warmth and charity are in short supply in the world at large. Of all her brain’s crippling knots, this one causes her the most fear and angst.
It wins that sorry distinction by a whisker. The competition is stiff: Witt’s worldview drives her distress, and her distress drives her worldview. A facile climate doomerism has her convinced that society as we know it will collapse. An obsession with “whiteness” fills her with self-accusation. (Even her internal racial struggle sessions are cause for reproach: “shame and self-disgust” are “the charmed white experiences of racism.”) She frets over displaying “symptoms of biological determinism” in the form of “traits coded as ‘female.’” She sees herself as a cultural appropriator, as a perpetuator of “the class politics of an unequal society,” and as someone (to return to race, her guiding fixation) who speaks from “the discredited subject position of a white person.” Even when dancing, she must grapple with the “accusation” that she and her ilk “had gentrified a subculture just as we had gentrified the neighborhoods we lived in.”
If Witt were just some drug-addled journalist with terrible politics, it’d be easy to send her book flying across the room and be done with it. But she’s too frank, open, and raw to dislike; too engaging to put down. Her words have a gravitational pull—they suck attention indiscriminately past the event horizon. Her prose is spare, muscular; it is remote, yet intimate. Much as she might resent the comparison, Witt is a bit like Hemingway, coldly relating the events of a calamitous existence. She is full of witty lines and delicious metaphors. She has a gift for juxtaposition—the loving embrace versus the drunken stupor; the political activist versus the dissipated hedonist; the light of day versus the dark of night. She sets up a series of collisions and, in each instance, something has to give.
Witt places “Black” and “Brown” in upper case, “white” in lower case. Her disapproval of suburbia borders on contempt. She pities her cultural inferiors, stuck “interpret[ing] their interior lives through binge-watching television.” Despite her professed dread of taking stances while white, she indulges in a crass left-wing imperialism, quietly judging the locals, on a trip to Nigeria, for their conventional social attitudes. She celebrates the madness of 2020 as “a summer of passion and catharsis” (though it slowly dawns on her, as the riots multiply, that “the rage could not be relied upon to channel itself exclusively in righteous directions”).
How seriously are we supposed to take this? What are we to make of being lectured by someone who, through lack of civic, familial, or professional obligation, can carouse all weekend and sleep until Tuesday morning?
To her credit, Witt is aware of the discrepancy, and of the shortcomings of her worldview more generally. “I knew our life in Brooklyn did not constitute any form of political resistance,” she says at one point. “I had to write,” she admits at another, “because I didn’t have my own family and if I didn’t write I would have nothing to show for my life.” She marvels, if only for a second, at the “long history of technological miracles and human triumph” that undergirds her comfortable condition. Her “partying,” she acknowledges, might be nothing more than an “expression of nihilism.”
She understands that “the left . . . ha[s] adopted a secular religion, complete with religious censure.” She gently mocks those who “referred to New York City as ‘occupied Lenapehoking.’” In the depths of the pandemic, she watches as Andrew’s progressivism becomes a mental disorder in the most literal sense. Using zip ties, he festoons his bike with golf clubs. “There are all these people like me who feel guilty playing golf,” he explains, “and this will make golf ecologically sustainable. It will change everything.” He puts “Black Trans Lives Matter+++Reparations” in his social-media bios.
J. D. Vance recently attracted a hail of criticism for past comments denigrating the proverbial childless cat lady. In Health and Safety, the cat belongs to Andrew, not Witt. But the book is indeed a close encounter with the kind of person Vance presumably had in mind when he complained, in a 2021 interview, about women “who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” It’s true that Witt has no business running the country (or, really, anything), but she is not some mopey cartoon villain. She is complex and interesting, and her book is a story well told. “I might not have anything important to say,” she concludes, but “what g[ives] my life meaning” is “the process of inquiry and observation.” At that, she is very good.
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