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Emily Witt sets her arresting memoir, Health and Safety: A Breakdown, in New York City from 2016 to 2021, charting her entry into the city’s techno scene with its mind-altering drugs, ecstatic music and community of people sometimes embracing, sometimes resisting a changing new world. In her book’s first section, she describes learning the “geography of nightlife,” writing gauzily about raves and parties she attends, the drugs she takes and the general euphoria that blankets her life for several months as she falls in love with a fellow raver, Andrew.
When the Trump presidency begins, we are thrust back into the waking world with her, and the story takes on much darker hues. Still, she continues to party until she can’t: COVID-19 hits the city with ferocity. Gone are the raves and the DJs and the scene itself, “and with it the illusion of health and safety.” Witt invites us to relive a tumultuous era in the country’s history through the eyes of a keen observer.
Witt, a staff writer for the New Yorker and author of the acclaimed exploration of nontraditional sex, Future Sex, relays her experiences covering watershed moments and national tragedies: the aftermath of the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, protests after the death of Breonna Taylor, and the verdict in the trial of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd. She reflects on the country’s collective heartbreak and rage alongside her own personal losses, like her tumultuous romantic entanglement and breakup with Andrew, which throws her world into chaos. And she deftly analyzes her role as a journalist in a mad world where her work feels, at times, ineffectual.
Witt looks back at this time of experimentation with wisdom, writing that she used hallucinogens to “psychically rearrange a world I understood to be so deeply corrupted . . . that I sought a chemical window to see outside.” In the end, readers who prefer a tidy memoir that culminates in a single awakening may find Health and Safety wanting; it’s more like a spider web glistening with many realizations that branch out in connecting threads. This sharp, deeply personal work is all the better for it.