Health and Safety: A Breakdown

by Emily Witt (Author, Narrator)

In the summer of 2016, a divisive presidential election was underway, and a new breed of right-wing rage was on the rise. Emily Witt, who would soon publish her first book on sex in the digital age, had recently quit antidepressants for a more expansive world of psychedelic experimentation. From her apartment in Brooklyn, she began to catch glimpses of the clandestine nightlife scene thrumming around her.

In Health and Safety, Witt charts her immersion into New York City’s dance music underground. Emily would come to lead a double life. By day she worked as a journalist, covering gun violence, climate catastrophes, and the rallies of right-wing militias. And by night she pushed the limits of consciousness in hollowed-out office spaces and warehouses to music that sounded like the future. But no counterculture, no matter how utopian, could stave off the squalor of American politics and the cataclysm of 2020.

Affectionate yet never sentimental, Health and Safety is a lament for a broken relationship, for a changed nightlife scene, and for New York City just before the fall. Sparing no one—least of all herself—Witt offers her life as a lens onto an era of American delirium and dissolution.

9 hrs.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Audiobook, Music, Biography Memoir, Mental Health, Drugs

9 pages, Audible Audio

First published September 17, 2024

About the author

Emily Witt is a writer in New York City. She has written for n+1, The New York Times, New York Magazine, GQ, the London Review of Books, and many other places. She has degrees from Brown, Columbia, and Cambridge, and was a Fulbright scholar in Mozambique. Her first book, Future Sex, about the intersection of sex and technology, was published in 2016 by Faber & Faber.

Reviews

[Ellie]

I’m deleting the original text of this review. I wrote it at 2 AM, annoyed, after reading a lengthy excerpt from this book in the New Yorker’s July 2024 fiction issue. It’s a rip, and I think it’s somewhat unfair that the #1 review for the book is a very negative one by a person (me) who hasn’t even read the whole thing. I copped to my limited perspective in the original review, and I stand by my immense dislike of the excerpt, but I wouldn’t want it to be the first thing people see when they click on this title. Listen to someone who read more of it than me.

[Sarah Paolantonio · Rating 2 out of 5]

A majority of readers of Health and Safety came to this book via the serialization (or excerpt) of it from The New Yorker (TNY) back in July of this year. It was a compelling story of how she fell further in love with psychedelics, the Bushwick underground/illegal club rave scene, and with a man she met there named Andrew. The excerpt goes on to detail Andrew's mental breakdown after a protest Witt essentially drags him to boroughs away from where they live. It was a nice, tidy "Personal History" in TNY and when you get to section three of this book, you'll recognize the story. Actually as you read the whole book, if you read the excerpt, you'll know that the other shoe is going to drop, and exactly how.

Now having read the whole thing ...this book really would've served readers better if it was just that serialization. It is the most interesting, condensed part. Witt falling in love with Andrew, going into her background, and discussing all the drugs she does--an impressive amount!--is fascinating, but only to a certain point. As someone who has been reading drug memoirs, and has written a few drafts of their own, I know the novelty wears off easily. You can only describe your LSD trip at a club 99% of the Brooklyn population (let alone the "real" population) will never see or experience ...so many times. Fascinating to know what a K Hole looks/feels like, and I plan to never find myself in that situation; but grateful to know what it "looks" like should I ever have to help someone in need.

Part II of this book is a regurgitation/sarcastic list/depressing cataloging of the Trump Administration. Which, as you recall, we have all lived through. It read as How Do I Beef Up This Book type of writing for a long while, and so much of it is still so real (and I was reading this the week leading up to election day 2024), I could only take so many reminders of what I had already lived through. Pairing the 2020 election, the COVID pandemic, the murder of George Floyd with Witt's being hired by TNY (who then sent her everywhere to cover extremely depressing school shootings and police murdering Black men, including the beginning of the school shooting at Parkland in Florida--a great time for news business! Ack!!!!!) with her love for LSD and consciousness expanding psychedelics is... a great One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other narrative for a memoir, or AHEM, a breakdown (but: not her own) but it also gets pretty tired pretty fast.

What gets me about Witt is she calls out her privilege throughout the book, knowing all the things she's doing is because she is an over-educated and fabulously employed cishet white woman. I read Witt's Future Sex (2016) which was pretty interesting but not life-changing. Early on in Health and Safety she talks about how she felt almost immediately disconnected to that book after its publication, and still flew around the world (reader: the whole ass world: from across Europe to Australia) to speak about it and its topics on panels and at conferences. She even details the struggles she had while writing a book about Nigerian cinema, and the time she spent there while researching it. Yes, agreed, that whole situation seems a little out of character; even she knew there were better suited authors for that project, but a contract's a contract (I guess). But listing assignments and contracted work that has copy of its own elsewhere does not a memoir make.

I enjoyed this book until Part II. I wanted to enjoy it further but by the time I got to Part III (Andrew's breakdown) I had already read the better version of it in TNY. There is a lot of glowing/winking/magical light in this book, her details of tripping, underground clubs, the people that frequent them, the scenes inside, and those inside her head, are unique and tinted great colors. Until it just becomes the same thing over and over again. Then she continues to splay out facts about stuff she was assigned in 2020 and 2021: the murder of Jacob Blake by the hands of police in Kenosha, Wisconsin; the murders Kyle Rittenhouse committed, the trial, and aftermath; the murder of Breonna Taylor by the hands of police; and so on: all stories she covered for The New Yorker, but just re-rendered here from her memoir's POV. A lot of this book is re-hashed, national news that, I'm assuming, the majority of readers will already be familiar with having lived through them. What purpose does this serve here only to say: Witt went through this (wait, we all did) and it was mentally exhausting and let's do some heavy psychedelics while we're at it.

Witt details in depth, with quotes, screenshots, and posts of what happened between her and Andrew, and she does, from this POV, seem like a bit of a despicable white woman who dragged Andrew to a protest in the Bronx she was not covering "because she had to see it" and while he goes to the front as a white ally, and then gets beaten by the cops and arrested, she flashes her press pass and is saved: a story you read (?) in The New Yorker, and then again in this book and ...reader: if I did something like that, and then it triggered someone to have a mental breakdown, get manic, get hospitalized, radicalized, and later he changes his life and moves on ....if I was responsible for something like that, I would not tell the entire world as many times as I could. All of the scenes Witt writes about what happened between her and Andrew sounds heartbreaking and terrifying but ultimately, a lot of stuff she brought on herself which she writes out for the reader to see in angry/annoyed/chastising texts she sends Andrew, behavior she displays at protests, her career, and her ability to pick and choose when she wants to be seen as an authority on drugs, news, journalism, and heartbreak.... it's a bit: wait, what? Why are we here?

I know memoirs are self-serving, but I wonder what purpose this one serves. Witt obviously processed what happened to her by writing it down word for word, drug use and all; but there is no difference in this book--aside from a few early chapters of falling in love and dropping LSD and doing coke and Ketamine as a better version of Wellbutrin to deal with depression and anxiety--than what the excerpt in The New Yorker accomplished months prior. I guess being an over-educated WW "with something to say" because something happened to her because of how she is in relationships (don't worry, she goes into detail).... I guess that is what a memoir is these days? No wonder I stopped reading them.

In the end, Andrew's manic prediction was half right: Witt did write a so-so tourist book about the rave/psychedelic scene in Bushwick (and kind of Berlin), techno, said some cool stuff about electronica being invented in the Midwest/Detroit (a book I'd love to read; where's that?), but didn't name it or come to any conclusion about it. COVID ended it literally but she never crafted that into anything else. What a bummer.

[Evan · Rating 2 out of 5]

cw: drug use, domestic violence

Health and Safety advertises itself as a book about New York nightlife, and it partially is. I picked up a review copy anticipating something of a hybrid memoir/sociological study about the underground electronic scenes and the impacts that COVID shutdowns had on the dynamics of the culture. But Health and Safety tries to be too many things at once. It wants to be a love letter to New York's techno scene. It also wants to document the deterioration of a relationship. It also wants to be a field report of life under the Trump presidency and how the murders of Black Americans at the hands of police affected our country. It also wants to be about drug use. Just because these four threads are interwoven doesn't mean they necessarily inform one another. At times, Health and Safety feels disjointed, as if each thread should've been its own section, instead of moving back and forth and back and forth. I went into this book expecting a study of nightlife, and in truth, Witt's writing on nightlife felt very cursory. It's a backdrop to a larger conversation: one which is not about nightlife, but something much more intricate and personal.

Throughout the book, Witt writes with flawed vulnerability, using the setting of raves and an unraveling relationship to document a transitional period of personal change. But I wanted more introspection from Witt's writing – more depth and observation. Instead, Health and Safety reads like a journal, documenting play-by-plays of Witt's experiences at raves, at protests, in distant countries and in grueling situations. The writing didn't jump out at me; it always operated at the surface. I'm not sure what I'm meant to take away from this. I expected some moments of revelation, of personal inquiry, where these threads could come together. Instead, the book heavily focuses on the deterioration of a relationship against the social backdrop of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. This is not the book I thought I was reading. I thought we were talking about nightclubs. Perhaps if there had been a stronger sociological or civic history footing, I'd feel differently, like there would be something I can latch onto. As it stands: a little too personal with not enough contemplation.

Ultimately, this book has a strange energy. I didn't really enjoy it. It felt dissociative, which is not a word I've ever used to describe a book before. I'm still trying to work through what I mean by that. Maybe it worked better as a long form article in The New Yorker and less-so as a full-length effort. Maybe Witt did not need to broadcast a tumultuous and violent end to a relationship into print. It feels like something I don't want to bear witness to. I don't want to be a spectator to this. It feels glowering. Points for Witt's detailed writing and the scopes of the subject matter, but I can't help but feel as though there could've been far more nuance and fascination if the book had pulled away from its first-person footing every now and then. If it were, at times, historical, sociological, anthropological. If it dug a little deeper into the floorboards of the nightclub it was already standing over.

[Miguel · Rating 1 out of 5]

If one’s interest leans toward listening to one of the most vacuous and unimportant memoirs in recent times, this should be right up your alley. Normally this would have been an instant DNF after the first few minutes, but unfortunately it overlapped with one of my interests in which the author waxed unpoetic about their experience in the Berlin electronic music scene and particularly time in Berghain. How did Sven not reject this poser? If reading about the minutiae of trust fund brats exploring the ever important topics of drug consumption, poly relationship drama, finding a loft in Bushwick, failed relationships, and other pithy observations sounds riveting, wrapped in a veneer of first year community college writing ability this one is for you.

[Mike P · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read this book after reading the new yorker article and i actually cannot believe i spent over $30 on it. witt is a technically good writer but i kept asking myself why i was reading any of this. im a huge fan of music and thought she would expand upon the music writing elements from the new yorker article but found what is oh so common in new york, people who adopt an aesthetic and practice of living with no actual depth of knowledge or something interesting to say about it.

she reminds me of bad friends who have faded out of my life, endlessly prioritizing a fucked up relationship and self destructive habits over stability. she thinks she’s too cool and different from her literary friends, such a pompous and privileged and wildly unrelatable thing to have. she seems deeply ungrateful for the life she has that is built off of writing about shit that she has no real connection to (not even getting into the nollywood of it all). she’s so consciously aloof, trying to project a coolness that is clearly just a shallow desire to be liked by the cool kids.

and as for the detailing of her ex’s mental breakdown, i again ask… why? i’ve had loved ones go through something similar and if a new yorker writer put out a book about it, so unforgivingly exploitative, saying nothing interesting or useful about mental illness and drug use, i would be so fucking mad lol.

lastly i can’t get the image of her flashing her press badge at that BLM protest out of my mind. i appreciate her honesty in that situation but im just so exhausted by white women like this continuing to center themselves in narratives like this. its so old and tired and honestly intellectually lazy to put something out like that that basicallly says “im so cool, i listen to music you wouldn’t understand, my ex boyfriend is crazy, and i love bushwick!” 😴😴😴

FINAL EDIT: I can’t believe she got away with calling Park Slope South Brooklyn. What the fuck??????? 😭😭😭

[Eric Mayhew · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an odd, somewhat challenging book to read as a person in recovery and mental health professional. I felt like there were several blind spots in this book and possibly a tendency to avoid confronting the deleterious impacts of rampant substance abuse. Of course, theres certainly a vulnerability to exposing one’s lack of self awareness, there’s a courage to exposing that vulnerability, and obviously from the outside it’s easier to critique and analyze the various problematic situations caused by lack of insight. For all the drug use in this book it seemed highly unbalanced with the reality of hangovers and mental deterioration that occurs on drug binges (at least in my experience, maybe she has a superior ability to synthesize and process mind altering substances). Like how do you regularly go on coke binges until 7 in the morning and then just miraculously resume your everyday life? Moreover, Witt’s lack of awareness that her boyfriend was floridly psychotic and most likely cycling through a manic episode that was probably caused by a combination of polysubstance abuse, underlying bipolar disorder, and trauma left me feeling quite disturbed and uncomfortable. that being said, I found the political analysis interesting and I like Witt’s writing style. This book and future sex make for an interesting combined analysis of the currents in American culture over the last decade or so. As I’m thinking about it more maybe the discomfort is the point as it was certainly thought provoking. I actually like that the book made me think deeply about the cost/benefits of lifestyle choices and the inherent privilege of being able to make choices about whether to do the next line of ketamine.

[Desiree · Rating 3 out of 5]

*spoiler
It started strongly with detailed descriptions of the drug and rave scene. For the last two thirds it dealt more with her dysfunctional open relationship with Andrew. We learn all of the ways in which he belittled and mistreated her which we then come to discover is due to a diagnosed mental condition bipolar disorder. It feels as if she didn’t have the passage of time upon which to fully process the demise of the relationship and be able to be objective about it. Despite his terrible behavior I found myself thinking about the ethics of writing about someone who was clearly suffering from mental health issues and viewed through that lens, was he fully responsible for his actions ? Is it fair to portray him as a monster ? It felt a bit one sided and if the premise was to write about the rave scene it took a massive detour.

[Emily Carlin]

It's a real "one man's loss is another man's gain" situation when it comes to the way Emily Witt's romantic misfortunes produce incisive cultural analysis (true for Future Sex, truer still here). Come for the grounded account of what it was like to live from ~2016-2021, stay in spite of the sort of 🙄 Bushwick techno scene setting.

Semi self-aware, though, about the limitations of the aforementioned scene as an actual form of resistance, e.g. describes an old head DJ bringing a crowd at Sustain-Release back down to earth:

Sprinkles was saying that what we had convened was another bogus spiritualism, a fake revival of a bygone era...Genres of music that had been shared by the adversarial experience of being excluded in America were no co-opted by well-meaning young professionals who had gone to college. The trans sex workers and johns of Sally's II, the Times Square club here Sprinkles had been a resident FJ in the early 199o's, had survived without our careful politics of sensitivity. I understood this point of view as an accusation that we had gentrified a subculture just as we had gentrified the neighborhoods we lived in. In the failure of our generation to mount any kind of effective resistance to the vampiric new technology that fed off us, or to the increasing concentration of wealth and power among a few individuals, or to our lifelong debt peonage, we could instead only mimic what had come before. We were searching for an experience of gathering and sound that did not remind us of someone trying to sell us something, that did not echo the existing forms that we could no longer trust, but the suggestion was that we could only co-opt, we could not invent. The group sat chastened. We had thought we had found something of our own but there, on the green moss, our serotonin levels plummeting, we were told we were mistaken.

I was eager to read Lauren Oyler's review, since I put them both in the category of being sort of Berlin-inflected snobs (not necessarily said in a pejorative way). But I could NOT have disagreed more with her take, which was that Emily Witt is overly cynical about the enterprise of writing. I thought that her reflections what a writer can do in the present were useful. e.g.

The medium we [writers] loved could no longer bring us the cultural prominence we desired. Writers no longer lived in Malibu, wore white suits, had expense accounts, drove convertibles, or wrote personal essays about going to Hawaii when their marriages foundered. Writers had no money, and therefore no style. The writers asked themselves: What was of the now? Their output illustrated the uncertainty. Was Beyonce the thing? Or was it 'the golden age of television'? Was it the decision to have children in the age of climate change? Was it a true-crime podcast? Was it the alienation of contemporary exercise routines? Was it articulating generally observable social media trends? A person could try to fit into an established mold, and be, say, a hard-boiled war correspondent, but even our country's unlawful massacres abroad no longer had the power to compel the public. The writing was laden with hyperbole and false epiphany. Its anxiously attempted to convince the reader of the importance of unimportant things --of the genius of our mediocre pop stars, of the revolutionary nature of token political symbols. Very little that was written pierced the ersatz nature of the world around us...The writers who succeeded in finding a mass audience did so through physical charisma, positivity, and subtle hints that they knew of the right things to eat and to buy...Desperate to stay contemporary, even writers mistook vanity for style, for culture, for intellect. Only later, well after Donald Trump had glided down the golden escalator to his place in history, did I make the connection between the process by which life had become propaganda and the the political phenomenon were were on the verge of witnessing. Why were we surprised that such. society would come to be led by someone whose entire identity was advertising and branding and endless repetition of his own name? And isn't a leader only a manifestation of a collective logic? Everyone played this game of self-magnification, even cultural critics and intellectuals. Entire cultural industries remade themselves around this new advertorial moment, where there was no longer a reality, there was only the avatar.

...Jia Tolentino's essays on Carly Rae Jepsen (which I love, to be clear) found dead in a ditch.

I actually find her reflections on her role as a journalist covering the Parkland shooting, Kenosha, George Floyd protests, on and on to be not necessarily uplifting but also not really cynical. Maybe just honest?

Getting to witness history was accompanied by the disappointment that, as had been the case of in Parkland, I could only contribute to the noise and never shift any outcomes. In that time the news of some injustice broke each day like a dull wave. Trump moved to expand oil drilling in United States waters. Trump rescinded protected status for immigrants from El Salvador. Trump shrank the protected areas of Bears Ears and Escalante National Monuments. Trump signed a kleptocratic tax bill. Trump was separating children from their families at the border and warehousing them in over-air-conditioned tents in the desert. I wrote as part of an anxiety-producing machine. No rhetorical register seemed to have the power to break through. I understood it was impossible for any writer to see outside the contours of the history they inhabited. I often thought about Edward Said's explanation that we still read Joseph Conrad in the twenty-first century not because he had been capable of condemning racism and imperialism but because, as someone trapped within a totalizing ideological system in the nineteenth century, he had been a master of the only tools a writer has at his disposal when he suspects something is very wrong: observational detail, self-consciousness, unease, doubt. This was the opposite of what was asked of us in journalism, which required a tone of authority, facts, and confidence in right and wrong. The profession rested on the faith that in presenting accurate information the world would correct its mistake in consequence. Going around the country and seeing what was going on was interesting; trying to think of anything remotely intelligent to say about it was impossible.

Okay, have already gone on far too long here. tldr; she describes this as a love letter to the (old, now dead) Bushwick techno scene and you can read it that way if you want but you can also read it as a chronicle of recent history. I like Doppelgänger by Naomi Klein more than this but they are in the same category, for me, as fairly clear-eyed looks at the pandemic/Trump first-term and their aftershocks.

[Mike Hartnett · Rating 1 out of 5]

Utterly vapid. The first half is about doing club drugs and partying, which was actually the draw for me. It’s a scene I’m totally unfamiliar with and I’d hoped to see it from a new perspective. There was no insight. Drugs are fun, dancing is fun, responsibility is nonexistent.

And then sort of abruptly the story transitioned to covering the tumultuous Trump/Covid/Black Lives Matter period, but only because the author wrote about them for the New Yorker. There was almost no personal reflection or thoughtfulness, and the only tie in with her actual life was her boyfriend (who was an entirely two dimensional and unlikable character) having some kind of psychological breakdown after being arrested at a protest. It was like the events of the entire country served only as a tool to make her boyfriend go from unremarkable loser to slightly more remarkable jerk.

She continued pining for this guy without once identifying a single positive trait he possessed. Then she made some stunningly banal realizations about how drugs are fine if you use them for the right reasons (read: hers) and bad if you use them for the wrong reasons (read: unlikable jerk boyfriend’s). The end.

I don’t require growth or insight if the story is good. But the story was as insipid as the lessons learned. Go forth, do drugs (or don’t), go lose yourself for months in Berlin’s club scene. I don’t care. But please don’t write a book about it.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe the people were the times

[Alec Kahn · Rating 3 out of 5]

As per this memoir’s subtitle — “A Breakdown” — Witt captures the unraveling not just of her personal life, but of the entire social and political landscape of pre-Trump America. All that is solid melts into viscous, combustable air.

For Witt, raving is a refuge. If anything, this book is an archival record of the rise and fall of a particular rave scene of New York, with its requisite string of DJs, clubs, parties, and festivals. Of course, the parties never last. They are inherently ephemeral, leaving behind nothing with their death rattle.

Raving is also no utopia. Witt explores how, as much as these drug-fueled parties bring about new forms of clarity and connection, they are equally poised to cloud one’s vision, to keep one hooked on numbing agents. And anyway, in the end, New York’s warehouses will be vampirized by corporate real estate, the clubs will become condos, and techno itself will be flattened into nothing more than a profitable, stylized commodity. The ravers will pay for hundred-dollar tickets with their jobs on Wall Street.

She meanders, and seems to fetishize Bushwick at the height of its gentrification, but Witt’s compassionate critique of rave culture hits the nail on the head. And, in the face of a totalizing Breakdown, there are brief moments, under the lasering lights and the ultrasonic music, where the bodies and movement and sweat form a fleshy pastiche, and everything coheres.

[Logan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Never read a book that was so close to a decade of my lived experience. Invaluable text for documenting techno parties and illegal clubs in bushwick from 2012 to 2020. From living off the myrtle jmz, bossa, mr kiwi, nowadays, unter, stepping on the carpet fetish guy, the short lived but amazing elvis guesthouse, crowded bathroom stalls, sustain release, attending the last pandemic-eve club night club, a 6’4” abuser getting expelled/soft-cancelled from your social scene—I had to look up we weren’t talking about the same people, sometimes we were. I can’t believe the author and I only have 5 mutuals in common, and only one who lives in NYC.

after that it became the worst sort of memoir

[Molly · Rating 3 out of 5]

More like 3.5 stars. I have complicated feelings about this book! Witt is hyper-intelligent and hyper-talented. She writes about this time and place and social scene with anthropological precision. But I felt it lacked a lot of feeling! Especially when so much of it was about the experience of listening to music, I was disappointingly unmoved.

[AJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

So close to being profound…its thesis (how Covid/Trump basically destroyed the idea of a shared, safe space) is right there but it doesn’t do enough to really land the “so what?”

A near-perfect time capsule of 2020 however

[Jon Higgins · Rating 1 out of 5]

Lacks wit.

[Matt Ebner · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book (and author) deserve negative 5 stars, it’s an awful spiteful hyperbolic miasma of despair and cynicism, willful ignorance, and hate. She is pitiful and pathetic. Enjoy!

[Sherrie · Rating 3 out of 5]

***I won this book in a Goodreads Giveaway***

This aptly named memoir is about the author's experience within the rave/drug scene. It takes place over several years, starting before she had ever tried drugs and finishes in a post-COVID world where everything has changed.

It was a very interesting book to me as someone who has never been in that scene and I have to give the author credit for being an engaging and thoughtful writer. I learned things without losing the humanity of it all.

I'm torn about how to feel about the last 80 pages or so of the book as it focuses heavily on a traumatic breakup she had with her long time partner. On one hand, I've suffered a breakup of a similar type and so I can fully understand how formative it is and how each detail feels important for understanding the big picture. On the other...it was out of proportion to the main themes of the book. I would not tell anyone how to process their trauma, but I hope she looks back on that section some day with a bit of chagrin and realizes putting pen to paper about so many details was part of her healing journey. It reads as though she's not as past it as she thinks herself to be.

Overall, this is a well written and interesting book about one very specific slice of life. I'd recommend it to my fellow memoir/biography nerds.

[Annie · Rating 5 out of 5]

oh wow this hit. i really did not like her conversation at her book talk so it’s a miracle i followed through on reading anyway. i need more well written memoirs that deal w covid…

[Marlene Baquiran · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great cultural critique and observation, but a lacking memoir.

This is a pretty good book that was tarnished by a pretty unreadable last fifty or so pages.

Emily Witt is a wonderful writer. She can break down abstract experiences into their clearest sensory details. She has an incredible journalists' eye. Detailing the world in plain fact and expressing ideology only in the implication of rather than opinions. Her critiques of cultural phenomena like Bushwick-progressive aesthetic and healing quackery and the are sharp and resonant because of this skill.

However a life is also full of feelings and as a memoir this book is stunningly devoid of this.

Why does Emily attach herself to such disappointing and basket case men? Her relationships are described in plain fact, where emotion is implied but never stated nor interrogated: they fight and she cries, they say something cruel and she forgives them, a cycle that repeats again and again.

The plainness of these autobiographical facts don't seem to be a rhetorical device but instead increasingly evidence a lack of self-awareness; the last fifty pages or so read like an incoherent, obsessive breakup rumination dump, one where your friend is trying to convince you how deeply wrong their adversary is but in trying to do so only makes their own faults and propensity for cruelty blazingly clear - those are forgiveable in a dear friend's DMs but unforgiveable to me in a published memoir, where you are also exposing and taking authorship over someone else's (i.e. her ex's) life.

It doesn't seem like this is a memoir of abusive relationships so much as of bad/toxic ones, but it's really hard to tell, because Witt muddies the lens with her own pathologies (e.g. her need to observe and document and never intervene in her own problems - very journalistic failings).

Jia Tolentino praises this book for honesty but I feel that honesty is not just the plain statement of one's truth but it is also an exercise of emotional courage, and this book does not have that. The gaps in Witt's telling point to failures of courage, starting from basic things such as - what is it in you that actually loved in these people who you are so eager to portray so terribly? What was good about it at all? I'm at a loss for the answers.

(On a meta-note, this feels like a broader issue with progressivism - an obsession with honesty and reflection and theoretical accountability without courage, without the enactment of responsibility)

It is fine to withhold your inner life from the public eye full-stop, particularly if you haven't quite made sense of it yourself (Very healthy to do so!) but if you are going to publish a memoir I think that is minimum bar that you need to clear.

If I could talk to Emily Witt myself, I'd say, kindly: your life is not reportage, the way you author it indeed ought to be scrutinised and interpreted at your own freedom; your feelings are central facts to this story.

I picked up this book because I love the techno scene and think there's so much interesting stuff to explore there, esp. in the context of political despair, and one of the core things about the rave party scene is the sense of soaring hope and imaginations of utopia - and the notion that hope itself is addictive, I would have loved to explore more of that.

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review-in-progress: i loveeeeeeeee, im in a real mood for people shitting on contemporary hippie transcendence seeking culture <3

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Great quotes:

My friends and the young people of Bushwick believed ourselves to be articulating a new moral order. We expressed this morality through the use of careful linguistic signifiers and acronyms that broadcast to a mutually understanding audience a politics of care and a heightened sense of taboo. ... we saw our morality as being predicated on an extremity of concern ... acknowledging one's complicity with power, or joining in periodic waves of mass sloganeering online, helped us convince one another of our shared goodness. We believed changing language could remedy inequality.

From the vantage point of the East Coast, Minneapolis and its politics started to look earnest and naive, and I did not see that I was merely conforming to a more conservative culture and learning to navigate its rules.

Edward Said's explanation that we still read Joseph Conrad in the twenty-first century was not because head been capable of condemning racism and imperialism but because, as someone trapped within a totalizing ideological system in the nineteenth century, he had been a master of the only tools a writer has at his disposal when he suspects something is very wrong: observational detail, self-consciousness, unease, doubt.

My inability to turn off this awareness seemed biologically rooted and specifically female, which irritated me because I hated any symptom of biological determinism and got upset when I could not rid myself of traits coded as 'female'.

In Berlin, if you didn't think too hard, it was possible to have some optimism about the future; there would be a slow progression toward energy efficiency, LED lighting, and the phasing out of single-use plastics; the needy would be cared for and housed ...

What I liked about reporting was that, like drugs, it caused a temporary defamiliarization that could reveal my own insularity and myopia, if I were sensitive enough to recognize them.

When I sat on my couch and watched the Third Precinct burn I knew that the particular political sentimentalism of the city was finally converging with the empirical reality of inequality, segregation, and police murder, and that it was extremely likely that at least some of the people setting Lake Street on fire that night were white kids- not accelerationaist outsiders but people equally enraged in the moment.
... people on the coasts always had trouble computing that the people in the middle could live radical lives.

[Brynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I lay in sunlight that had traveled through the vacuum of space. I sensed I was on the cusp of a change. I pictured each cycle of life—friendships, relationships, phases of experience—as an arc that emerged from a horizontal line. At any point along the line, a tangle of arcs hovered above like the ribbed vault of a cathedral. Some curves were in the process of rising, and some in the process of falling." (4)

"Later, those last weeks of June would glow in the past, as the last time when I had self-possession, as the last time when any number of possibilities for life were still arrayed before me, instead of just one." (28)

"Experience had taught me not to daydream about the future of relationships, so I didn't. For now we would get to know each other. The future would develop like a photo, until one day the image would be fixed." (68)

"The European acceptance of snobbery was invigorating and a good corrective. With her, I was reminded that mistaking complexity for elitism was a right-wing way of seeing the world." (73)

"When the possibility of a normal middle-class life recedes, exuberant scheming sets in." (89)

"We all knew we were lucky to have caught the moment at all, and even years later those of us who were there don't even really need to talk about it that much. In any case, the only words I can think of that name what it was like to be there have been corrupted." (121)

"Each window of these buildings had people behind it, and each one of those people was a world, but all of this humanity, zoomed out, appeared simply as vertical rectangles layered upon one another and reflecting the sun." (127)

"Some of us were in our thirties and having friendships in a way we were told that you were not supposed to have as an adult. Subcultures were for the very young, and scenes and drugs and staying out all night were something you grew out of. And yet there we all were. Most of us, once we were inside the scene, felt like it became our real life. But there was also a satisfaction in being good at our day jobs at the same time, or going regularly to the gym, or whatever other signal of reliability we could convey. We were playing both sides. The understanding of the world we shared didn't easily translate, and you couldn't explain it to people who weren't also looking for it." (133)

"You can ruin your own life in an instant, by not paying attention." (210)

"A middle-aged solitude that had always scared me was looming, and I saw the loneliness of the years ahead, and it terrified me. I was wrong about a lot of things at that time, but I was right to be scared about that. I knew that there would not be another chance, that the door on the fantasy was closing forever. I had always been skeptical of it, yet as it slipped out of my grasp, it was suddenly the only thing that mattered in the world." (231)

"People my age had been conditioned to mystify drugs; we were so heavily cautioned against them that maybe we gave them too much power, when in fact they were banal." (256)

[Madeleine · Rating 3 out of 5]

i devoured this book — its attempt to apply the journalistic voice to the dissolution of a relationship is genuinely chilling. i also often found it quite annoying. i’m sure the writer would say that’s logical, even expected in a narrative fragmented over the competing poles of participation and documentation.

i couldn’t tell who this book was written for. witt details party logistics like staying at the club for 16 hours. details that to a raver are unimpressive and frankly expected. and other details of her rave experience are presented as scene fact, as opposed to her individual preferences.

if the book was written for a layperson and literary audience, then i recoil at the specificity— need we include the real names for u**** and the annual september music festival? do we really need more boring straight people at the club? isn’t bushwick gentrified enough?

speaking of, i couldn’t figure out what exactly drove the narrator to the rave, what makes her a “head.” the text does briefly document techno as Black midwestern art and as integral to queer culture. but it feels that the writer is selective about situating herself within the scene. as an example, she takes pains to say she wouldn’t go to honcho as a straight person. but then lauds her attendance of every u**** party even as she acknowledges it’s a queer rave. she describes her decision to call her boyfriend her “partner” as aspirational maturity (nothing else?).

the book effectively wrangled with tensions i’ve often felt about the risks of writing subculture. subcultures led by systematically excluded people are rich, life affirming, and fucking fun. their brilliance is underdocumented. but with documentation can come gentrification of the scene, eroding the culture you were celebrating to begin with. i will certainly be thinking about how this book approached these dynamics as i struggle through this in my own writing.

[tiffany · Rating 1 out of 5]

picked up this book because i'd read an excerpt of this book ('the last rave') in the new yorker a while ago and the piece took such a turn that i still turn it over in my mind and don't know what to think of it even months later. unfortunately this is one of those situations where the content should have stayed a long-form essay and not an entire book. it feels weird to rate a memoir because it feels like assessing someone's life story, but i honestly think it would work better as a piece of autofiction rather than a memoir (or maybe a history book - the most interesting thing i learned from this is that techno originated in the midwest, but alas, this tidbit does not receive further elaboration).

the publisher blurb lauds the author for "sparing no one--least of all herself" as she "offers her life as a lens onto an era of American delirium and dissolution." i actually found this to be one of the most fascinatingly off-base characterizations of the book, because i finished it feeling as if she had spared herself most of all in her telling. i wouldn't call it a lens onto anything; it's better characterized as a kaleidoscope of disjointed pieces (music, New York nightlife, drugs, relationships, Trump, BLM, mental illness) that left me wishing i could spin the barrel and rearrange those pieces into something compelling.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is full of: vivid descriptions of introspective psychedelic experiences and hedonistic weekend-long raves in Berlin and DIY NYC venues, references to familiar Brooklyn spots, brutal / pithy judgments of “basic” people outside of her hard partying/artistic social circle, emphatic epiphanies about New York City and music… sign me up!! I am in the same generation as Witt and live in the same borough and maybe have some overlapping sensibilities. Sometimes, that’s enough of a story hook for me.

But a few knocks: for all the intense, soul-baring, and deeply personal details, it somehow still felt… detached and unemotional. (I was trying to find a helpful reference point to describe the writing style, and went with “Rachel Cusk as a journalist” and was told that sounds like Joan Didion.) And while the book’s sections helped give the memoir some narrative structure, I was less into the last two parts vs the first. The third section, mostly about her relationship ending and ex suffering from some psychotic break, began to feel uncomfortable and voyeuristic. (It also really brings you back to covid lockdown era… ooof…) And I was waiting for a stronger thematic connection to be made between her life/relationship and the political events she was reporting on, which came eventually at the very end, I think...

This is the kind of book that people like to get angry at and whine about (on Goodreads) because they don’t like the writer - female, “coastal elite”, “irresponsible” etc - and her life choices more than the book itself. If that’s you, then maybe just don’t read this one… But I really enjoyed!!

[Lydia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Woman goes to raves and does drugs to cope with the cognitive dissonance required to gentrify bushwick.

At the end she goes to a rave in detroit and the vibes reconnect her with the True roots of Techno. Also, the beat of the music produces dreamy visions of nearby factory farming. She's spent one third of the book lamenting the things she witnessed reporting on the "Trump era," as if it was self-contained, so she thinks longingly for the earnestness of her Minneapolis upbringing -- she's been gone for over 20 years... Could this be the place? No, Emily. You all live in Brooklyn. Your particular cognitive dissonance isn't escapable unless you find another brand of it by literally extracting yourself from New York, and not just for a weekend. This ending was so wild to me, I literally yelled listening to the audio book in the shower.

"...the idea of the Midwest as America's heartland, a place that is both a strategic center and a retreat from a too-complex world." ... "But this lingering sense of hidden riches, of a cultural vitality not yet fully exploited or appreciated, brings to mind again that feeling that the Midwest is a thing appraised from elsewhere, a fund externally managed." - Phil Christman, Midwest Futures

"I pictured its linearity as I danced, the glossy leaves sharp enough to cut skin. Their genetically engineered uniformity. Their precision, which was like the precision of the music. It was the center of the country. It was at the center of us." - Emily Witt, Health and Safety

I will probably edit this again bc I have SO many more thoughts about journalism.

[Peter Wiley · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite moments are the secret Dan Creahan and Fart in the Club shoutouts. I remember all of the sets she mentions from the various sustains. Can’t believe one of yall ravers wrote a book this good

[ohm · Rating 1 out of 5]

I just didn’t feel much while reading this book. It was a robotic narrative. Unrelatable.

[Clare · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was interesting and fun to read, but the author, while clearly very talented, was so insufferable and un-self-aware that I didn’t enjoy it as much as I hoped. The book’s structure resembled that of a long form essay, and I think it would have been better as such. In an essay, the author’s insufferability could have been minimized without losing any substantive plot.

There’s also something deeply disturbing about reading a wealthy, white, gentrifier woman’s extremely detailed 265-page account of taking drugs in a place where poor, POC, non-gentrifier locals are frequently terrorized by the police under the guise of “anti-drug policy.”

[Michelle Brant · Rating 3 out of 5]

Witt is a great writer but she really could not decide what this book was. I almost laughed out loud and threw my book at the wall at some of the non sequiturs between the breakdown of her personal life & what was going on in the country (although the way she captured the mood of 2020 was almost too triggering to read).

If she picked a lane this could’ve been a great book, but instead it felt like a completely disjointed attempt at both, and her attempt to connect them in the end was a huge stretch. I also feel like she really did not interrogate any of her motivations at all, and it was almost too detached. Finally, a personal bias but it’s hard for me to take the ~rave scene~ so seriously.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mémoire (?) picked up dans une cute librairie de NYC lors d’un passage rapide l’année passée, annoncé comme un deep dive dans la scène underground et EDM de Brooklyn, où l’autrice/journaliste du TNY écrit. Finalement c’était une juxtaposition de pleins d’affaires où le lien n’était pas nécessairement explicité, de la covid à la couverture des tueries aux USA, à la couverture des manifestations BLM a la fin de sa relation avec son chum. Mais oui aussi avec des explorations sur la scène EDM de ses années-là. Difficile de trouver de la cohérence et « le point of it all ».

[Albx Villarmea · Rating 2 out of 5]

Este libro me ha hecho perder el ritmo de lectura y además se me ha olvidado loguearlo por semanas. La lectura prometía: una periodista del New Yorker que hablaba sobre la cultura rave y el consumo de drogas de principios de los 2000 en NY en primera persona. Aunque el principio es guay (más antropológico, explicando desde su experiencia los efectos de drogas en distintos contextos) va perdiendo fuelle porque quiere meter demasiados temas en el libro (elecciones de trump, su relación de abuso con su novio, el covid)

En conclusión bastante disappointing no recomiendo. Eso si, la edición es preciosa.