Emily Witt's Book About Taking Tons Of Drugs Is Really Good

"It's a liberating thing to write as if your parents don't care"

Emily Witt is a New Yorker staff writer who in 2016 published a book about polyamory (Future Sex) and now has a new one about drugs (Health and Safety: A Breakdown). Both memoirs are written with shocking levels of honesty and candor. “It's a liberating thing to write as if your parents don't care,” she tells me.

Health and Safety takes place in Brooklyn’s dance music underground in the late 2010s and early 2020s, focusing on the late night (and early morning, and afternoon, and late night the next day) antics of Witt and her boyfriend, named Andrew, a trust-funded computer scientist with whom she immediately falls in love, before their affair goes horribly sideways.

It contains the best writing about dance music culture I’ve ever encountered, and also discusses the politics of the era. But at its heart is the theme of recreational drugs, and why we use them. She writes:

Andrew and I had been doing drugs for different reasons. He took them to turn off parts of himself that threatened to destroy him. I took them to psychically rearrange a world I understood to be so deeply corrupted by moral hypocrisy and the profit motive that I sought a chemical window to see outside of it (also for pleasure, for fun). 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. It was not that the drugs I took made stupid things appear intelligent, but rather the opposite: they set a standard that had to be met, and for a few years I found a group of friends who channeled their intelligence and their artistry into meeting that standard. But the cost of pushing our minds to extremes was high. To get to that place, some minds get lost along the way. The monitors that keep people safe and self-aware get overridden; the chemical override can become more about the drug than the world, and the shade is pulled down over whatever window out to the world the drug might have opened.

I first met Witt twenty years ago, when she was starting out at Miami New Times and I was writing for Riverfront Times, both owned by the same alt-weekly chain. Even back then she was partying me under the table. I’m a big fan of her writing, but the absolutely-copious amount of drugs she describes ingesting in Health and Safety had me concerned for her, well, both, particularly since the book takes place at the height of the fentanyl crisis.

How do you get past the fear of being judged by people you know in real life?

Honestly, when I wrote the book, it was the pandemic and the immediate aftermath. And I felt at the time like I didn't have a lot to lose. I felt like my life had been ruined and the world was in such an uncanny time that none of those concerns really were at the front of my mind the way I think they would be now. So I wrote it from a place of almost compulsion. I think part of what propelled the writing of the book was just trying to figure out for myself what had happened and making it right for myself.

When it came to drugs did you worry that, say, your old kindergarten teacher would read it?

Yeah, of course. I think anybody of our generation has that as an internal monologue, this idea that drugs are not compatible with a successful or functional life and that you're sabotaging yourself in some fundamental way if you use them.

I guess I was a little bit lucky that in my first book I wrote about sex. So it already made my parents ashamed and upset. And having gone through that once already, I realized it's ultimately a liberating thing to write as if your parents don't care, or to write in spite of your parents.

Write as if your parents aren't reading.

Yeah, exactly. But unfortunately, they are reading. So, of course they wish that I wrote about something else, but at least they can be satisfied with the New Yorker credential and my other credentials to talk to their neighbors about, and be quietly mortified about the rest of it.

I had fear for you when you were taking GHB. What’s the appeal?