Health and Safety: A review
An insightful and enviably well-written memoir set in a tumultuous era reflecting on the halcyon days of an influential subculture and the tragic arc of a complicated relationship.
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In order to be marketed effectively, non-fiction books need to be about something, and typically, pithier topics are easier to sell. Lost in the assertion that Emily Witt’s Health and Safety: A Breakdown is about the Brooklyn rave scene, or the first Trump presidency, or drug experimentation, or dealing with a romantic partner’s mental break is the fact that it is a memoir that manages to credibly cover all of the above in just 272 pages. It is insightful and enviably well-written, dense with evocative paragraphs, and devoid of cliches in a way that feels as effortless to read as it is difficult to achieve.
Witt’s vivid descriptions of deeply personal experiences that resist verbalization feel profound on the page. On the appeal of techno, she writes: “The music did not say what to feel or when to feel it. Instead it followed a process of defamiliarization and destabilization. To make a literary comparison, it had the discontinuity of poetry instead of the continuity of a story or a novel; it pursued a different order of sense-making… What techno offered was not meaning but space, and the possibility of evoking the complexity of the world through discontinuities and breaks, interruption and hybridization.”
One might similarly delight in Witt’s descriptions of the more disappointing states you might encounter while partying: “I was having a spell of inertia. It pooled inside me like an oil spill, suffocating the dolphins and waterfowl. I pictured an antique Miele vacuum sucking it out with the sound of the suction device at the dentist’s office. But no, it was too deep, it was a bog, it was the stored carbon of millions of years. As in—the pill we took didn’t seem to be working.”
And if you’ve worked in media before, as Witt has at the highest levels for many years, her unflinchingly realistic—some might say pessimistic—views on journalism’s power to affect societal change may resonate deeply in you as they did in me. Following her coverage of the Parkland massacre and the subsequent lack of gun policy changes—amidst all the other early Trump administration injustices—Witt observes: “I wrote as part of an anxiety-producing machine. No rhetorical register seemed to have the power to break through.”
She illuminates these struggles with a perspicacious style that can only come from someone speaking their truth, but arrives at no clear answers.
The most poignant stories are those that address the tension between Witt’s identity as an upwardly mobile, white, heterosexual cis-woman who works in prestige media and the scenes that she navigates as a member and a reporter. What will other ravers make of the fact that she will be among the first people to professionally document a community whose culture is driven primarily by queer and brown artists? How does one balance the ethics of participating in protests while covering them for work? Is it possible for a modern woman to square her desire to maintain a radical self-image with the urge to lose herself in monogamous love and parenthood? She illuminates these struggles with a perspicacious style that can only come from someone speaking their truth, but arrives at no clear answers.
The final part of Health and Safety centers on the subtitular breakdown of Witt’s long-term partner’s mental health and their shared life. Under threat, we react to survive, justifying our choices after the fact when making meaning of it all. Here, however, Witt recounts traumatic sequences that happened years ago in precise prose, free of adornment or analysis: “I could see by the expression on his face that this was outside the realm of any normal conflict. For once, I knew to keep my mouth shut, but it didn’t help. Andrew grabbed a handful of the rice on my plate and dropped it into my glass of wine. I began to tear up… I don’t remember everything he said. He wasn’t coherent, he was yelling.” It reads less like the memoirs of a notable writer and more like a journalistic account of a tumultuous period of a woman’s life—except the reporter and her subject are the same person. Fans of literary non-fiction will miss the vivid interiority from prior parts of the book, but good journalism is about accurately portraying what happened, not telling us how to feel about it.
For people unfamiliar with Brooklyn’s rave scene from 2016-2021, Health and Safety paints an intriguing portrait of a culture that we may not see again for another generation. Many of us who were a part of it in some capacity will feel fortunate that she documented her own perspective in such a stylish, researched, and readable manner. And I hope that those who take issue with her depictions of certain events or people are inspired to share their own accounts. Writing about these subjects is difficult to do well, but that’s also why it’s worth pursuing.