WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD PRIZE • A NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR: TIME, NEW YORKER, PITCHFORK, LITHUB, AND NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW • From the New Yorker staff writer and acclaimed author of Future Sex comes a memoir about drugs, techno, and New York City
"The first great book about what it was like to live through the Trump presidency"—Emily Gould, The Cut
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.
A Most Anticipated Book by Vulture ∙ Bustle ∙ Lit Hub ∙ The Millions ∙ That Eric Alper
"Haunting . . . [Witt] writes with such cool precision . . . . By turns, disdainful, cleareyed, playful, serious, adventurous and terrified . . . it’s a testament to Witt’s skills as a writer that this book is enhanced, and not diminished, by her refusal to reconcile such contradictions."
—Jennifer Szalai, New York Times
"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."
—Emily Gould, The Cut
"Witt’s directness and sincerity are disarming . . . . She is pursuing hard introspective truths with a neutral, unsentimental rigor."
—The Atlantic
"Remarkable . . . the first truly great book to come out of the pandemic, but also a properly wistful joyride through the good times that preceded it."
—Interview
"Astonishing . . . I could not stop reading."
—Ezra Klein, The Bulwark podcast
"There are moments in this book when Witt elevates writing about altered states of consciousness to something akin to the most brilliant art criticism I’ve ever read in my life. With shocking precision and honesty, she maps zones of transcendence and devastation, freedom and repression, both in the individual mind and in the collective experience of America. Health and Safety is a tribute to the profound and radical potential in substances that insist on bringing another world into being, and an acute, heartbroken reckoning with their limits, too."
—Jia Tolentino, New York Times bestselling author of Trick Mirror
"Health and Safety is a foreboding and panoramic account of a subculture, relationship, and country in crisis. Radical, lucid, and harrowing."
—Anna Wiener, New York Times bestselling author of Uncanny Valley
"Fiercely honest . . . Health and Safety is a gritty look at dissolution and despair masked by hedonism and excess, and it’s a story of people trying to cope and forget as best they know how."
—Book Riot
"Thoughtful and eloquently written . . . [Witt’s] descriptions of the joy and perspective she found in the [techno] scene blew my normie mind"
—The Maris Review
"No one writes about contemporary American life—about drugs, sex, dating, madness—with as hard an edge as Emily Witt. Health and Safety is a masterpiece of observation and analysis. Read it if you can."
—Keith Gessen, author of A Terrible Country
"Arresting . . . readers who prefer a tidy memoir that culminates in a single awakening may find Health and Safety wanting; it’s more like a spider web glistening with many realizations that branch out in connecting threads. This sharp, deeply personal work is all the better for it."
—Bookpage
"Witt, with a gimlet eye and a voice that never shies away from the truth, no matter how uncomfortable it makes us, offers a tour of the years that begin with the surreal catastrophe of the 2016 election and through the COVID years and the murder of George Floyd, giving us insight to a time that all too often feels like a nightmare that has, like all dreams, begun to fade from memory. This remarkable book didn't just allow me to relive that time, but helped me to understand it."
—Ayelet Waldman, author of A Really Good Day
"Brilliant . . . self-eviscerating, honest, often painful—a superbly realized chronicle of an ever-darkening age."
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)
"An arresting memoir . . . Witt’s well-honed prose makes her gut-wrenching portrait of 2010s boom-and-bust hedonism feel like the sharp observations of a trusted friend. This intense portrait of one woman’s wild years deserves a wide audience."
—Publishers Weekly
Emily Witt is a staff writer at The New Yorker. She has covered breaking news and politics from around the country, and has written about culture, sexuality, drugs, and night life. She is the author of the books Future Sex and Nollywood. Her journalism, essays, and criticism have appeared in n+1, the Times, GQ, Harper’s, and the London Review of Books.
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