Emily Witt's search for meaning
In her memoir, "Health and Safety," The New Yorker writer finds herself in an underground scene, looking at the possibility of a traditional relationship, and grappling with the Trump and COVID years
It happens every few days. The sensation runs over me and I struggle to do anything for more than a few minutes. I’ll stay up late at night staring at nothing in particular. Everyone in my house will go to bed and I’ll sit on the couch with a light on and a book out, maybe the television is on, but it’s not streaming anything. Instead, Google shares pictures that I’ve now seen hundreds of times on the smart television’s home screen. I wonder: What is the purpose of this? Who am I? What have I done and what will I do? Does it matter?
The feeling lingers for days. Weeks. Actually, it never leaves. What strikes me, though, is that I don’t think this stranglehold of meaning in life strikes everyone. I can’t see some of the people I grew up with sitting around pondering the mystery and meaning of life. So it was refreshing when I picked up Emily Witt’s memoir Health and Safety to see someone else grappling with life and their place in it.
Witt, a staff writer for The New Yorker, takes readers back into the middle of the 2010s when there was hope, promise and the volcanic explosion of the first Donald Trump presidency. To do this, Witt writes about her second life, far away from the writer who sold the book Future Sex, as a regular in the New York EDM scene.
The push towards Witt’s second life begins after the sale of Future Sex and her decision to give hallucinogenic drugs a chance. She goes on an ayahuasca trip and begins to wonder what purpose life is. She starts second guessing her choices. At the same time, she begins to dedicate part of her life to the underground EDM scene, which includes illegal clubs held across the city and weekend long festivals.
Witt finds freedom in the clubs, the parties, the drugs, the people and music. It’s far removed from the buttoned-up professionalism of book clubs and writerly adventures. At the same time, Witt falls in love with a young man she meets in the scene and, even though they share a similar apprehension towards stereotypical and traditional relationships, Witt discovers she’s fallen in love and starts to ponder the idea of starting a family and adhering the social norms expected of her.
And then the pandemic arrives and her life tumbles into something else. Witt finds herself in a dark and dangerous place, living out a nightmare, questioning, again, who she is and what the purpose of this life is.
Memoirs should bring us somewhere we haven’t been or present us with something we don’t know. They’re invitations into the private lives of our authors. They’re about sharing secrets. And Witt holds nothing back. She brings readers into clubs across New York City, Berlin and in the outskirts of society. She takes detours along the way to political rallies and George Floyd protests and into her tiny apartment. Health and Safety is about a slice of Witt’s life, but it asks bigger questions: what are we looking for in life? What do we want? And how our expectations can be turned upside down and then twisted and knotted.
No life is linear and Witt sees all the craters and mountains along the way.
Emily Witt is the author of Future Sex and Healthy and Safety. She is a staff writer for The New Yorker.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Where did you start and how did you start writing this book? You jump in from a point of an almost anthropological study about this specific place in New York City — these clubs that you're going to — and you branch off into a relationship and then also into the madness of Trump and COVID. You have all of these three things kind of intertwining, so what was genesis?
Well, the oldest writing is actually the drug writing, because, as I say in the book, I was interested in writing a book about that. But, then in maybe 2017, 2018, there were tons of books about drugs, which was around the time that my schedule freed up. So I was like, okay, that's cashed.
I probably started the drug writing in like 2013, 2014 and then I started going out on a pretty regular basis, 2016, 2017. And, just in the way one does if you're a writer, you kind of write stuff down that sticks in your memory or that feels like a transformative experience. So I was writing then, but about the dance music scene and about these parties I was going to, but just for myself, because big part of the scene was not blowing it up. Also, it was a relief for me to have a part of my life that wasn't for writing. At that time, I was like, okay, this is a non-writing zone, there's not a lot of other writers here, I'm not under pressure to turn this into any kind of writing, but of course I was compulsively writing anyway.
I have snippets of things written down, but eventually you need distance and perspective to be able to write about it. You can't be going out and writing those things and be able to analyze who you are in the moment. That comes across in the writing.
And then Trump gets elected and we have the Trump presidency, which started in 2017, and I remember reading, I don't know if you ever read Patricia Lockwood's amazing piece about going to a Trump rally for The New Republic around that time or during the election, and I think she describes him as “a surface with no handle, a wall without a door,” and it was really hard as a writer in that moment to understand the phenomenon. I didn't see any writing in that time that I was like, oh, they got it, they nailed what the fuck is happening. All we had was confusion.
I think Trump has been really demystified in this election cycle, but, at that time, I felt like something important was going on but I didn't really have anything intelligent to say. I felt baffled and scared. So my sense of how to write about the Trump era at that point was to try to take notes, try to remember details, which I don't even think I did very well.
In 2019, I got a writing residency at Yaddo, and I was like, okay, I'm going to go and try to take some of this writing from the past few years and see if there's anything there, and I'm going to let myself go without any kind of plan, any purpose, just write it down. So that's when I did more writing on the party scene. Then the pandemic happened and I thought, oh, okay, well now that whole world just ended and I can write a eulogy to the years in New York pre-pandemic. And then I had this catastrophic breakup and everything just kind of worked chronologically. The end of the Trump era, the end of the party scene, the end of my relationship all really coincided.
I realized I had a book probably by the end of 2020, early 2021.
One of the things with memoirs that I think you need is a secret to tell. You need something that's different. Generally, a memoir needs a secret and your secret is you're doing the thing that I think is the most anti-New York writer thing, which is you're doing a thing where there's no other New York writers. You write about a place that none of them go to. So when you're writing all those snippets and then you go to Yaddo and you start piecing it together, do you feel like you have this secret or this world that they've all just ignored?
I mean, everybody stopped ignoring it in 2021, but, in those years leading up to the pandemic, it did feel like a secret world. I'd never felt that in New York before, and I've lived in New York for a long time. We all had a sense that we were kind of living a double life for a minute, and that inside the places where we were hanging out, nobody outside had any idea what was happening in there. Even people who were our age and our same aesthetic taste maybe had no idea. When you would tell people, oh, I've been going to techno parties, they had no frame of reference for it. Then that changed because a lot of clubs opened — real licensed venues opened — and now, I don't know, now it just feels like pop music and pop culture here in New York to go out like that, but for a minute it didn't.
I've been thinking a long time about trying to write about pop music and pop culture. I go to hardcore shows and those bands have started to move into other areas. I have been thinking about all these rappers and pop stars have started bringing in all of these people that I like, such as Olivia Rodrigo’s producer wasn’t in the hardcore scene, but was in a band called As Tall as Lions that I love. Now all of the genres have homogenized almost, and dance music has done a similar thing, I feel like. It's both good because I can be like, this is good, but at the same time, you lose your little secret safe space. So as you're writing this where you kind like, this is kind of a eulogy to a secret safe space that I had?
Yes, I was like that. And I know it evolved, and I know that there's secret safe spaces for 23 year olds in New York right now, so I'm not worried about that. But that's just how culture works in the U.S.
I saw some video, you remember that band Salem? They made this video with storm chasing and tornadoes and Some really mainstream pop star just ripped off. I've never seen such a direct rip off of something that had nothing to do with pop music and then this pop reinvention, and it happens constantly. I don't know. Some people like Charlie XCX get to maintain this idea that they're in both worlds at the same time.
As I was reading, I was thinking a lot about secret identities and some sections reminded me of Mike Sager’s work. Some of his work would often be about going somewhere and just be there and try to put you, the reader, there. That was his point. It was never to explain. You don't, because there's no way to explain EDM music to somebody unless they listen to it. So your job is to put me in a place. So was there anything you were reading or thinking about at the time to try to place you in that?
I always go back to the old new journalists from the 70s, and I think what they always emphasize was building a scene over an interview. A lot of journalism, now in particular, has become very interview centric and take centric. You have to have a take when, actually, I don't think that's necessarily what readers want. They often want a scene. They want to know what it looked like and what it felt like and what people were saying and how they spoke and what they were wearing. Good nonfiction writing, to me, reads like that on a very basic level.
Then I was just kind of reading my sort of first favorite first person reporter, essayist, people who are just the classics, Didion and Baldwin. In this book, I guess I was thinking about, do you know who David Wojnarowicz is?
Yeah.
Well, Close to the Knives, and how that's a very political book, but also very personal and really beautifully written and a memoir. These kind of books that just try to capture a specific time and place. And then, as I mentioned in the book, I was reading a lot of books set in the run up to the Third Reich.
That whole section I was like, that just sounds brutal.
I mean, except those books are amazing. I mean, some of them are like Christopher Isherwood’s novels, but it's very nonfictional. And those books I think did this thing that I was trying to do where we don't know what’s going to happen at the end of this year, and maybe all of the fear is going to feel sort of overblown and melodramatic, but there's an unease and a sense of some long phenomenon playing out that indicates it might not end that well. I wanted to be there observing it and capturing it without being able to predict whether it'll be useful to read later or not. Books by Natalia Ginzburg and stuff — some of them are written retroactively, they're written from the 60s or 70s even — I think they are really good.
How did you find any time to write while doing all of this? It sounds like an exhausting couple of years.
You're like, I'm going to do some drugs. And then move to this other thing. The way it's written feels very fast. I guess it's moving and you're moving fast and you're like, now I got to go to Berlin. I didn’t know if you had a half-decent night of sleep in here. It seems like a lot of work and a lot of running around.
Well, so 2016 and 2017, I didn't have a job. My book had come out, so I got my book payment. I got the next book payment for that Nollywood book. They were selling the foreign rights to Future Sex. So I was getting a pretty regular paycheck, but I didn't write that much in those years. So I partying, basically, and my job was promoting my book and writing the Nollywood book, which was only 25,000 words, so it was a mini-book. So there was time and I wasn't actually doing that much. In 2018, I got this job at The New Yorker where I had to write constantly and, from 2018 to 2020, that was the only kind of writing I was doing. I was kind of sad about it because it was so easily forgettable. It just kind of published. It would go up, it would be the news and then just bye.
That's like the writing when I was doing newspaper stuff, they're like, get four stories up before noon. And I was like, what? Four? My brain doesn't work that way…
And I'm lucky I don't have to write that much at all.
It just wears on your brain. It just feels like it's lost to the time dump of the internet.
As a writer, you just start falling black back on cliches and platitudes because you can't really see anything new and you're not using the part of your brain that notices and observes. It gets tired. But after my bad breakup, I took a leave of absence and I had some savings, so I was able to do that and then basically wrote the book over the next four years when I had time. I think I took another three months off. But to be perfectly frank, I'm in debt right now. I have to get my book payment. I'm in debt. I took off three months this year. So it is like I just had to write it. So that's another thing. And it was the writing that gave me pleasure and the writing that felt easy versus the work writing.
While you're working on through all of this, are you thinking about like, wow, what's my boss going to think about when they read this? Are they going to know that they hired me right after I was flying all over the world, going to clubs? As I was reading I didn’t know if I could this honest because I would be afraid it would make people around me mad about the things I write. What do your bosses now think as they read this and publish it on The New Yorker?
I was really scared about that and I was honestly surprised when they took the excerpt and even more surprised when they decided to put it in the print magazine. Just, yeah, I don't know. I was in embarrassed and projecting my embarrassment. But, when you think about some, I don't know, Ariel Levy's piece about her miscarriage or they let their staff writers sometimes have a moment where they get really personal and you don't write like that every time, it has to be rare a little bit, and then they let you do it, and maybe I had to work there for however many years — six years — before they trusted me with that. I don't know.
I guess my thing is everybody's going to know about your secret life. You're letting out this little secret of yourself. I'm not surprised they published it, but a lot of times if somebody does let their secret life out, they don't give it to their boss. They're not like, here's my thing that I've been doing, and you didn't know about it when you hired me. So I was wondering if you thought about that at all?
I write about politics and it's all about the presentation of normalcy. I am watching these people whose lives can be destroyed by an affair, a revelation, or all of which I don't care about, but apparently people do.
Yeah, I don't know. There's some compulsive side of me that just can't lie very well and can't conceal. Maybe it’s because I'm from Minnesota. I don't know. I'm just not good at. I can't really keep a secret in some way and so even where it would be better to not put everything about your life in a book, it's hard for me. It's my own experiences, so it's hard to not write it, and then if I didn't write it, it's really hard to not want people to read it. I wanted to reflect in a lot of the parts of the book. When you write for a news magazine, you have to present this idea of authority and I wanted to reflect that at the time that we were all speaking authoritatively, none of us understood what was happening. None of us can explain some the violence around us — this mean streak, this hatred it.
Yeah, I don't know. I wanted to write something where I could have doubt and negativity and pessimism, which you aren't really allowed in some ways when you're writing in an institutional voice.
Now that everybody needs a substack and a newsletter and and a social media presence, we have to keep that facade up when we write constantly to a fault, to a point where you end up a Matt Taibbi and your entire persona changes because you can't let go of some sort of false side or fake idea of yourself. And it is refreshing to read a book about somebody like that. I think what always makes me interested in Didion is yes, her sentences are, well, everything is well written, well presented, but there's so much doubt within her work. There is a lot of self doubt in everything she writes and a lot of honesty to it that makes it work. I think we've taken the other parts of her and other parts of those new journalists and kind of forgotten the pessimism in their work.
A lot of new journalism and what passes is that kind of writing now is that is kind of hyperbolic publicity writing. It's just like, oh, they took the hyperbole of Tom Wolfe, but not the social critique.
I mean, the drugs were kind of related to how I felt with Future Sex and part of it is I noticed an extreme dissonance between how people do something and how it's intellectualized or discussed in the media or written, and I want to fix it. There's just a part of me that wants to show one person's real experience, give someone something to refer to that feels a little more accurate than a lot of what's happening.
You do write about social media and the facade in sections, and one of the things that really got that I was thinking about was my own 20s and what we do. And then also at a certain point you were like, well, what am I doing? What is life? You're writing about the question that we all have, constantly, which is: what am I doing here? What does any of this mean? What is the purpose of it? And I am wondering, for you now, when you look back at writing this, do you feel you have any answers to that for yourself? Not for anybody else. I don't care if you haven't for anybody else, but for yourself. Do you feel like you've started to, at least, kind of grapple with some of it?
In my writing and in my life, I'm genuinely interested in what feels new and different, and whether that's music or fashion or the way people describe their lifestyle choices or drugs. I'm always going to want to look at it. I'm always going to want to look at it with a kind of optimism. I think that it just really gives life meaning for me. So whether it's going to Burning Man back in the day or going to the orgasm cult or trying all the drugs that are out there that don't seem that dangerous, that really gives me a sense of purpose, engagement, and happiness.
But in my work, I'm also grappling with the idea of a conventional life and the life that we're all told is the life that represents success and happiness and safety, especially now with JD Vance or somebody telling us that being the only proper adult life is married with children and if you don't have that life, you're miserable. You're a failure. None us want to let that discourse get to us, but, of course, I think it gets to anybody that doesn't fit into that model as much as you're like, fuck you, leave me alone. It gets in your head. It gets in my head. So a lot of this book is an attempt I kind of made to fit into that and it totally blew up for me. But also, I didn't actually ever really try it that hard, and so maybe it's my fault.
What was your search? You’re posing the question: what is my meaning? You write Future Sex, and then you're like, well, what's next? And it felt like you didn’t know what any of it meant. You're not having a midlife crisis, but you're searching for something. You're searching for any meaning in a world where meaning has become so flattened by the Internet and Instagram and everything, and the thing that you go towards is a place where none of that's allowed. Is that what you were looking for in that moment and trying to feel it out and try to find a safe space as far from everything else?
I feel like in those years, the projection of life overtook life and it just keeps going and it'll be harder. I think it's one of the most meaningful distinctions between the life we live on the Internet and the life and physical act of life.
I'm like a cusp Gen Xer, I didn't grow up with social media, I’m part of the generation that taking a photo of yourself feels vain. It's hard and I don't know how to do it well. It just doesn't come naturally. Whereas anybody, even two or three years younger than me, really knows it. Part of me hates it, hates the vanity, hates the posturing. It makes me sad. All the emphasis on body image and stuff that happens now and a lot of the culture I seek now is something that reminds me that there's an outside of that and it is just not the best use in many ways of our creativity. I mean, an entire generation of engineers went to work for these companies — these advertising companies — and now I think that there's all this AI stuff and biotech stuff, it feels really different, but I feel like an entire generation's brain power went to social media, which is just really kind of depressing.