The First Great Memoir of the Trump Years
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. This was also around the time she entered an idyllic love affair with a younger boyfriend, with whom she lived and partied. Soon after, she became a reporter for The New Yorker, traveling around the country and documenting the aftermath of school shootings, alt-right rallies, and the protests in Wisconsin that intensified after Kyle Rittenhouse shot and killed two protesters. Her parallel lives of partying and reporting culminated in a life-altering moment at a Black Lives Matter protest that catalyzed the protracted and dramatic ending of her relationship. Her boyfriend, injured by police, experienced a manic episode that led Witt to question her own perception of reality.
In Health and Safety, Witt has created a historical record of a moment in time that feels real and human in addition to containing a virtuosically detailed depiction of what a night out on LSD, ketamine, MDMA, cocaine, weed, and alcohol feels like. We spoke about the purpose of journalism, turning 40, and what it feels like to be on the verge of another Trump presidency.
Why is the book called Health and Safety?
A lot of people have been asking me that. It’s meant to be ironic. The book is about a time in my life when I went from being somebody who read all the New York Times health articles about which SPF you should use and how to not get cancer to then becoming someone who acted contrary to that advice in a lot of ways. Risk avoidance and wellness culture are a morality of our time, but it’s all about consumer choices rather than larger society. And then the pandemic happened, and it turned out that when the real shit hits the fan, our little micronutrient obsession is total bullshit. A million people died. There was an echo of that in a lot of things, like the idea that police and guns keep us safe. The title is about the myths that we tell ourselves versus the empirical reality of what is actually dangerous and how we treat that.
Before the outset of this book, you were a reporter for a number of years and had written a book about sexuality. Then, in 2016, when this book begins, you stop taking Wellbutrin and start experimenting with recreational drugs. Did it feel like you were searching for the same thing but through different means?
I took Wellbutrin because I just wanted to be more functional. I just wanted to be less emotional, more productive, more focused but less moody. I didn’t like going to the pharmacy once a month and having to take something every day. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I just didn’t like it. And there were downsides. I really noticed that I couldn’t exercise the same way. I felt a cardiovascular effect that I didn’t like, where I was just out of breath a lot more easily. I felt physically weak. That kind of freaked me out.
I think I also just reached a point where I wanted to deal with whatever feeling it was that I was suppressing with the drug. I felt like I finally had the time — I got a book deal and was able to quit my job, so I didn’t have to perform perfectly every day. And so then I could let out whatever it was that I was trying to manage and see if maybe it served some purpose in my life.
Then once you got this job at The New Yorker, you were reporting on school shootings and Trump rallies by day and going to Bossa Nova and illegal warehouse parties in Greenpoint at night. Did those two threads of your life feel really dissonant at the time?
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.”
It felt a little hidden in that sense. And then, when I was working, I’d have to pretend to be culturally legitimate to these really right-wing people I ended up interviewing. And that felt like a kind of cosplay. I mean, I don’t dress in any kind of subcultural way, but it felt like I had to pretend to be normal — to make myself legitimate to the people I was interviewing but also to speak in a voice about the country that would be seen as some kind of authority, even though inside, in a lot of instances, I was as baffled and dismayed as everybody else. I mean, it was really hard to figure out what to say about certain things.
You would fly somewhere, file your copy while you were still there, be really productive, and then go home and party for 24 hours. And that partying entailed sometimes-heroic amounts of drugs. How did you get it all done and stay in one piece?
It was my dream job. I didn’t want to screw it up. I didn’t even get the job when I first interviewed for it, so I really wanted to prove myself. It was just the nature of the reporting at that time. Because I was writing for the web — I wasn’t writing for the print magazine — it had to be fast. Often it wasn’t quite fast enough, even. It would be, like, three days late, and the news cycle would already have moved on.
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.
And then writing this book was a chance for me to write as myself, versus writing in the institutional voice of The New Yorker as a journalist, and a chance to step back from facticity and information and instead focus on feeling. Reported writing can be useful — it’s important — but it’s not the thing you turn to when you want to remember what it felt like or when you’re trying to process what happened.
What were your relationships with your sort-of-normie friends like during that time? Did you feel like you were pulling away from them?
I left New York for a long time in my 20s, but the social scene of writers when I first got to New York, in 2003, was pretty misogynist. I mean, Vice magazine, the people turned out to be literal Nazis. When I came back to New York at the end of my 20s, I was hanging out mostly with writers. And I just didn’t find it to be that healthy of a place to be. I never got a real relationship out of it. I never got a romantic relationship. I definitely felt a lot of gender stuff there.
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.
Your relationship with Andrew ended when he had an incredibly disturbing and violent manic episode, exacerbated by his continued use of drugs, during the summer of 2020 while the pandemic is still raging; you’re going to Black Lives Matter protests; you’re flying to Kenosha, Wisconsin, to report on the Kyle Rittenhouse shooting and police-brutality protests there. What did it feel like to revisit that time and write about what happened?
It was hard because I still don’t think I really could wrap my head around it. It’s not really like I came away from it being like, Oh, that’s what that was all about. The first Trump presidency provoked a crisis of writing. Nobody could figure out how to write about him. You just could not grasp him, and nobody could get outside of it. And I felt like now, almost four years later, I could kind of get a sense of what was going on there a little bit better. But in general, it was amazing how quickly we wanted to forget all that, right?
Now, I think we’re all a little bit embarrassed about how scared we were during the pandemic, even though the fear was totally justified and so many people died. But when we remember all the scolding and stuff from that time, I think everybody’s a little embarrassed and doesn’t really want to think about it too much.
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. That’ll take years to process still: what came out of that, if anything came out of that, or if it was just a kind of rupture along a fault line that just went back to everybody forgetting that it is there.
How did it feel to cover the protests that summer?
That finally there was a reaction proportionate to the kind of violence that was being inflicted. As a reporter, I thought maybe we would see some big structural change after feeling helpless for a long time.
I really felt it was important to be there and try to describe things as accurately as possible because there was so much distortion and denial. I remember that day the mayor went on “Brian Lehrer,” and they had the “Ask the Mayor” thing and everybody was so mad. Usually it’s like, “Oh, there’s too much dog poop on the sidewalk.” And that day was like, “You’re gaslighting us.” A lot of the mainstream publications were kind of mealymouthed in their coverage, and it felt really important for me to be like, “No, the cops are really out there beating people up for no reason. That is happening. I saw it. I have the support of a reputable institution behind me. The mayor is lying to you. This is happening.” It felt really important at that moment to have the stamp of The New Yorker for whoever was doubting the reality of what was going on on the ground.
How did the protests affect the way you think about journalism and what it’s for?
As a journalist, I felt guilty and conflicted that I could go home at the end of the day and leave it, to some extent. And as a journalist, you’re taught to fall back on the rules of the profession in those moments. You’re an objective observer; you don’t get involved. I remember at the end of one night when the cops were in New York, the cops were just aggressing anybody and grabbing them off the street and arresting them. And I was walking down the street — I had my press pass on — and they tried to grab some kid, and he was like, “I’m with her. I’m with her.” And I just froze, unsure of whether to be like, “Yeah, he’s with me,” which is the right and moral thing to do, or be like, “No, I’m a journalist.” And in the end, I was paralyzed and didn’t say anything. They left him alone, and we were all fine.
There’s a lot of reasons not to join the protests besides “being complicit with power.” And there was Andrew, telling me that I was complicit with power; I had that voice in my head. When are you doing the best thing by staying away from taking a side, and when is it the time to take a side?
Do you feel like that’s a more subtle question for you now in retrospect?
I think I’ve come to believe that the rules of the profession really are there for a reason. I’ve just come to feel intuitively that they’re the right rules. Even when something is really polarizing — you could post all day about it on social media or you could keep your mouth shut so that you get real information from people who might not otherwise talk to you. I believe in the task of getting that information and doing what it takes to get that information.
Do you think journalism is in crisis right now?
I think part of the crisis of journalism right now is in the liberal consensus. There is an idea that if you provide people with accurate information, that society will respond to that information in a positive way. The optimism of journalism is like, 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. And nothing happens. You really start to feel, as a journalist, like it’s never felt more pointless to document this thing and put it in the world. What am I doing when I’m writing about a school shooting? Are we just wallowing in our own dysfunction and violence and tragedy?
But the point for me has been just putting it down on paper and hoping somebody can figure out what was actually going on later.
The part of the book where Andrew has a manic episode was so hard for me to read because I read it at the same time that my husband, Keith, did, and the first thing that I did was go to Keith and ask him “Was it like that with me? Was I that bad?,” wanting to hear “No, it was so mild compared to what she described. You weren’t that bad.” But he was like, “You kind of were that bad.” And I was just like, Okay. I mean, I never made and rode a bike with golf clubs attached to it, but I’m sure I did whatever the “me” equivalent of that was.
When writing about Andrew’s breakdown, did you wonder what would happen if he read this or if anyone close to him read this and how they would feel?
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.
This is how life is. I didn’t want to pretend like it was something else. And I guess I, as a reader, don’t like when things are hedged out of some idea of what’s polite or of propriety. It’s like, Why bother writing anything if it’s not going to be a true thing? What’s the point of writing if your motivation is trying to make yourself look good, or make somebody else look good, not portraying something real?
When you wrote the book, you were about to turn 40. There’s a really powerful passage where you write, “A middle-aged solitude I had always been scared of was happening 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.” What’s your perspective on that now?
It wasn’t until I was on the other side of 40 that I was like, Oh, I’ve actually been trained a little bit to fear that moment, whether it’s just watching Bridget Jones or whatever. Or all the “Don’t forget to have a baby” discourse. You see this thing looming. And even as much as I didn’t give a shit about marriage and stuff, you’re just taught “Oh, you’re going to hit this wall and then the rest of your life is going to kind of suck,” which it turns out could not be further from the truth. I wrote this book as I was processing 40 and the end of any kind of girlish dream that I was going to have a nuclear family, basically.
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, Okay, there’s no perfect life. There really isn’t. There’s costs with either one of those things. 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’ve always felt interested in alternative lifestyles as a way of making sense of my own reality, and I do think there’s a new kind of person emerging. A lot of people are now hitting 40 without ever having been married. And not only are they not married, but a lot of them live alone. And the number of people who have never had kids is pretty steady, actually. I like the idea of being a new kind of person and trying to articulate what that is and what our relationships will look like, what sexuality looks like, what gender looks like.
This is a totally settled question for you; you’re not going to have a family.
Oh, no, it’s not. I have eggs on ice. I’ve definitely wondered if I should clean out the fridge and see what happens. But I’m 43. At what point do you stop?
Partnership was just really elusive to me until my mid-30s and then my partner that I was with didn’t really work out. Everybody was like, “Oh, at least you didn’t have a kid with him.” But I was actually devastated, for a year-plus, that I hadn’t walked away from that with a kid, because at least I would’ve had that, even though I lost the other thing. But that passed. It just passed. Now it’s just like — I would need to use the book money to pay for this, basically. My parents paid for the egg-freezing, but I only did one round. I was 39. They don’t even know if it works until they try to fertilize them.
There’s a little moment, toward the end of the book, where you are sober for a while and get back on Wellbutrin, then go off of it again and start going to parties again. What is your relationship to drugs and partying now?
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. For example, after the RAVE Act passed in the early 2000s, if a promoter had a drug-testing station, then they might be seen as encouraging drug use and held liable if somebody died, so it was better to not have the safety measures there.
The opioid crisis revealed the total failure of our intellectual model around drugs because it revealed that if something’s presented to us as medicine, we surrender our authority. And we’re like, Well, the doctor said it’s fine, so a bunch of people were given a really dangerous drug — a really physically addictive, habit-forming drug — and now we have 100,000 people dying a year of fentanyl overdoses.
I still feel like there’s this crisis, because somehow those people are not on the front page of the news every day. That’s a lot of people. That’s more than breast cancer, car accidents, gun violence. And then when you reverberate that beyond the individual, to their families, and for how many years it’s been going on now, it’s really appalling.
Though it’s definitely gotten better. We are talking about drugs with a lot more nuance than we used to, and there’s a recognition that to fall into addiction is not some moral failing on your part. There’s still a lot to write about and think about that isn’t settled. We don’t understand everything.
In the spring of 2021, once the vaccine was available and people began returning to normal life, you started going back out to parties in Brooklyn. But you noticed all of these changes, and the music was different. People were dressing in a more expensive way. It felt like the scene had become just entertainment for a different group of people. So much of the book is about dramatic change and mourning a period of time that feels definitively over. What else feels like it’s forever changed since 2021?
What I’ve noticed is the young people are under so much pressure to dress a certain way. And everywhere I go, people are making content on the streets and wearing these outfits that look kind of like Instagram fashion tragedies. I’ve seen so much Realtree camo.
We now face the possibility of another Trump presidency. What feels different about that now than it did in 2016 or in 2020?
I’m on the campaign trail for The New Yorker, so I have thought about this. It feels less hysterical and more determined. I don’t think people are gnashing their teeth about Trump on social media, but I hope there’s a very real sense of everything that’s at stake if he wins and that it would be significantly more totalitarian the second time around. I know that this sounds like a Democratic campaign speech, and this is literally what they’re saying on the campaign. This time, I feel like there’s so much less media coverage of Trump because people are too exhausted hearing about the threat of him. But I think people are very aware of the threat of his second presidency, and I think the Democrats are trying to at least acknowledge how ordinary people feel and the stresses that they’re under financially. Whereas I don’t think Hillary Clinton did that the first time around, and I don’t think Biden was doing that very well.
But I don’t know if it means anything or if it’s just words. At least they’re not like, “Don’t you love the health-care marketplace? Is it the best thing that’s ever happened to you?” I think now they’re like, “Oh yeah, you can’t buy a home. You can’t afford to have a baby.” They’re acknowledging that with their policies. But whether those policies are real or actually do anything — or if they’re just Band-Aids — is for voters to decide.
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