When the Drugs Stopped Working

Jessica Baldanza on Emily Witt's Latest Memoir

Health and Safety: a Breakdown

by Emily Witt

Pantheon, 272 pp. $23.20

A millennial woman at the end of her ropes seeks answers in drugs and hedonism in Health and Safety

New Yorker journalist Emily Witt’s autoethnographic memoir Health & Safety is part elegy for the previous decade’s NYC-Berlin rave scene, and part indictment of America in the years leading up to and including Trump’s first term. The book progresses more or less chronologically with brief allusions to her youth when, having witnessed her druggiest childhood peers succumb to a kind of cyclical “self-generated squalor,” she opted for a sobriety compatible with her ambition. At 31, having established a career in journalism but not lasting love, Witt yielded to an interminable ennui that saw her desire for risk redouble, leading to the very squalor she’d previously avoided as she became a casualty of the long 2010s.

Witt makes it evident early on that she feels tread upon—by her biological clock, her want for enduring love, Cons and Neocons, the banks, Second Amendment loyalists, socialites, selfies, endocrine-disrupting chemicals, ecological collapse, civil rights infringement, intractable secularism, and perhaps most of all, the declining relevance and grandeur of her vocation of writing. These pressures, compounded and enmeshed in the 21st century, trigger in Witt (and the rest of her milieu) a defensive pursuit of professional and personal self-optimization more conducive to neuroses than an elusive state of “wellness.”