Sex, Drugs, Raves and Heartbreak

HEALTH AND SAFETY: A Breakdown, by Emily Witt

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.”