Emily Witt’s new book, ‘Health and Safety,’ is both a chronicle of rave culture and a capsule of recent political history. Emily Gould spoke with her about the purpose of journalism, turning 40, and the potential of another Trump presidency.
Emily Witt didn’t set out to write the first great book about what it was like to live through the Trump presidency, the beginning of the pandemic, and the radical moral and political shifts that happened in America between 2016 and 2020. Instead, she started out writing an elegy for the Bushwick-based rave-culture scene, which she got involved with after developing a strong intellectual and personal interest in hallucinogenic drugs.
I don’t want to say it was a secret life, because it wasn’t, but it did feel secret in the sense that a lot of other people — even people my own age, even people with the same cultural interests — just didn’t know about it. I would tell a lot of my friends about it, and they would always say the exact same thing: “Oh, I can’t stay up all night anymore. I’m too old.”
But I also saw this job as a chance to write a first draft of history, and I probably even said that when I interviewed to get the job. Because there was so much commentary, the chance to directly witness something as it was happening was increasingly rare. And then I wanted to be able to write about it in a descriptive way and not in a newspaper way.
So when I met Andrew, his friends were, compared to the writing scene, all a little younger, and a little bit more culturally diverse, and a little more queer, and definitely less patriarchal. I found myself kind of moving into a new social scene and turning away from that one that had been kind of my whole world in New York up until that point.
And the protests, which were more than protests, I feel like it was the one time, at least in my adult life, when I felt a real sense that everything could explode. I don’t know if you went to Barclays Center that first Friday. I’d never seen anything like that in New York. I’d been to tons of protests, but just the kind of despair and the feeling that there was nothing to lose — that people were not going to just sort of parade around a little bit and then go home. That felt really different.
If I write about this deeply corrupt thing, a politician will read it. There will be some laws passed; they’ll close Rikers; they’ll whatever. Of course I thought a lot about that, and I had a lot of doubt. But I wrote this immediately after all this happened, and at that time I really, truly felt like I had nothing to lose. I felt like my life had been destroyed and there was nothing to do but tell the story of what I had lost, the fantasies that I’d been holding on to. I wrote it from a place of desolation at a time when it felt like nothing was going to reconstitute itself for a little while.
And then, meanwhile, the first two years after the breakup with Andrew were really difficult, and I felt really damaged. But then, all of a sudden, life got pretty pleasurable and I came to really love my independence. I was meeting really nice guys again, and I have a really cool job. And so then you’re kind of like,As much as I fear I’m missing out on some mystical experience of love by not having had kids, I am pretty happy in the day-to-day.
I still go to parties, and I sometimes do drugs, but more than that, they continue to be an intellectual interest. I read every book that comes out about drugs — and not just psychedelics but about addiction and stuff, too, and about the opioid crisis. It’s just something that, for whatever reason, fascinates me. I think it’s because there’s a real dissonance between how people do things and the official discourse around it.
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