Emily Witt Can’t Make It Make Sense

Emily Witt spent much of this past summer feeling nervous about what people were going to think of her book, Health and Safety: A Breakdown, which chronicles her falling in love with both the Brooklyn dance music scene and a music producer she met through it, as well as the eventual nightmarish breakup that followed during the pandemic. When I spoke with her in mid-July, two months out from the book’s September publication date, Witt had been spending time in Los Angeles and was getting ready to take a red-eye that night back to Brooklyn, where she has lived for much of the past decade and a half.

“The thing I will say about the pandemic is that everyone got their Dantean circle of hell,” Witt told me. “Every single person I know had some weird, bad experience that was very unique to them.” She laughed after she told me this and I got the impression that, more than four years after the events of that summer, that long first year of the pandemic still seems a little surreal to her. The world shutting down, the disappearance of most forms of in-person socializing; the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent protests that set the country ablaze; hospitals running out of oxygen to help the dying; morgues with no space to store the dead. All of this, plus a reality-upending breakup.

The years of the book, and the relationship, roughly correspond to the Trump presidency and the relationship, like the presidency, reached a fever pitch in the summer of 2020 as the country seemed to be coming apart. For Witt, not only was the unbelievable happening at home, where she was being gaslit about her nosediving relationship, but outside, throughout the country, where the unimaginable was happening every day, and Americans were being told that everything was fine.

“The denial of my reality that was happening within my domestic experience was also happening in the news every day,” Witt explained. “I remember Bill de Blasio going on The Brian Lehrer Show, after everyone in the city had witnessed the beatings with their own eyes—the police beating peaceful protesters—and us being told there was some reason for it, [or] it didn’t happen.”

The book she had initially wanted to write—a book about the Brooklyn dance music scene and its subcultures, incorporating writings on her personal interest in drugs—was not something that interested her agent. But then, she explained, as her “life fell apart” that summer and she began folding her own story into the book, that changed. “My reality was really denied to me and nobody else was there to confirm it, because of the pandemic. I totally doubted myself,” Witt explained. “I needed to write what had happened. I needed to do that for myself, because there was never any resolution. There was never any acknowledgement of what had happened by my ex. I had to resolve it for myself.”

Witt began trying to write through what was happening to her, with no idea how it all could possibly come together. She’d begun sketching out some of the personal sections of the book—about when things were good in her relationship—a year earlier, at an artist residency at Yaddo. Late in the summer of 2020, with the pandemic soaring, her home life had become so deranged that Witt, with nowhere to go, packed her bags and left. Soon after, her book began to show its shape to her.

“I guess the book is very much me and where I was at in my life,” she told me, “hitting my forties, coming to terms with, okay, this little fairy tale life, it might happen in some way—I’m not saying I’m never going to have love again, or family—but it’s not going to happen in the patriarchal, heteronormative ways. It’s just not going to happen.”

*

Witt has been a journalist for close to two decades. She first began publishing the kind of writing for which she is most known and praised—perceptive cultural criticism about sex, desire, dating, and drugs, in which no one, least of all herself, is spared from her dry, calmly withering analysis—about a decade and a half ago in magazines like n+1 and the London Review of Books. In 2018, Witt was hired as a staff writer at the New Yorker, where she has worked since doing the unenviable job of trying to make sense of the post-Trump American political landscape. Before the New Yorker, Witt cut her teeth in her twenties as a reporter, then as a book reviewer and features writer, before becoming the author of two books, Future Sex and Nollywood: The Making of a Film Empire, both published in 2016.

In many ways, Witt was doomed to the writing life. Her mother, Diana, was a book indexer and her father, Leonard, was a features editor at a local newspaper in Minneapolis, where Witt grew up, and at a regional monthly magazine. Notably, her father is also the editor of a 1991 Writer’s Digest guide to feature writing, The Complete Book of Feature Writing: From Great American Writers, Editors and Teachers. Growing up, she told me, her parents ordered all of the major American magazines, which Witt read even before she could comprehend them. Witt’s older brother, Stephen, after leaving behind a career in finance, also became a features writer and is the author of the 2015 book How Music Got Free (recently adapted into a Netflix docuseries narrated by Method Man).

After graduating from Brown, with a major in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies and a minor in Art Semiotics, a decade of continent-hopping followed. First, Witt moved to Miami Beach for a job as a beat reporter at the New Miami Times, an alt weekly. It was 2005 and she found herself in a newly reascendent Miami. Everyone was talking about the parties they were attending, the new condos they were buying. Recounting the experience in an essay for n+1, she describes leaving Miami after working there for a year and a half: “If another interviewee told me as we drove in his golf cart through a maze of pink stucco on top of a leveled mangrove grotto, that he ‘lived in paradise,’ I thought I might wrestle the wheel from him and plunge us both into the algae blooms of a fertilizer-polluted drainage canal.”

Witt then moved from Miami to Mozambique where, on a Fulbright Scholarship, she researched the rise—and subsequent flagging—of Mozambican cinema, as well as doing some reporting for U.N. news agencies. Acceptance into Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism (where she took the investigative specialization track) moved Witt to New York. After graduating, Witt swapped Columbia for Cambridge (England) because, she would later write in a different essay for n+1, “sometimes it’s easier (if imprudent) to take out another federal loan and get another graduate degree than it is to sit in front of a computer in lower Manhattan for ten hours a day.”

After an offer to become the New York Observer’s Wall Street beat reporter in 2011, Witt moved back to New York. But, due to some last minute reorganizing, she ended up covering publishing instead. Witt had also begun freelancing more extensively and making a name for herself, particularly for the pieces she was writing in which she herself appeared. She once told an interviewer that she’s interested in instances where the reality of a culture or a community doesn’t match up with its idea of itself. This is a helpful coda to understanding much of Witt’s work—this idea that the truth lies somewhere in between the stories people tell themselves and the facts they choose to ignore.

This approach often puts Witt in the awkward position of having to embed herself among communities and slowly uncover the cognitive dissonance at play. In many of her pieces, she often appears as a curious, sometimes lonely presence who has planted herself on the borders of a place or a community. The writing is perceptive, rich in visual details; the tone is deadpan and occasionally, abruptly, funny. (In an otherwise serious paragraph in Health and Safety about police violence in America, she compares Kyle Rittenhouse to “a muppet baby George Zimmerman.”)

It was also during this time that she realized she no longer wanted to be a beat reporter. “I just realized I cared too much about writing,” she said in an interview years later. “I was too interested in the literary aspect of journalism to be an investigative reporter and I was too opinionated, maybe, to be a straight beat newspaper person. I wanted to be weirder with my writing, more opinionated, and come at things from a more subjective and personal place.”

Witt knew she wanted to write a history of women’s sexuality in the 21st century—an exploration of how technology was altering the ways in which women seek out (and understand) sexual and romantic relationships, as well as the promise and problems of always-available, screen-mediated intimacy. Witt’s own curiosity and anxieties about how she should be living her life—whether there are more fun, or meaningful, ways to be spending her early thirties, whether in a polycule, at sex parties, or in a conventional relationship—feel like the undercurrent moving the book forward.

As part of research for the book, Witt moved to San Francisco and began to write and publish essays on her research as well as her own personal dating experiences. She still did not envision herself as a character in her book at this time. When Mitzi Angel—then editor and publisher, now president and publisher at Farrar, Straus, and Giroux—acquired the book, Angel told Witt she should insert herself into it. She argued that Witt’s presence and active participation in it would ultimately be what tied the book together.

As a result, Witt somewhat reluctantly found herself participating in subcultures that she said she wouldn’t otherwise have spent time with. In the book, she spends time with couples in non-monogamous relationships. She goes to OneTaste, an orgasmic meditation practice where she watches and joins the other participants who have their clitoris stimulated in a group setting while an iPhone timer counts down 15 minutes. She attends the shooting of a public disgrace-themed adult film. She spends a lot of time watching internet porn.

Future Sex is an attempt to map the shifts in sexual culture and understand the technology underwriting the shifts. “The future was a discomfiting cultural story and difficult to discern,” she writes towards the book’s end, leaving us with the realization that the book’s gestures towards our potential futures have really been a way to talk about our ever-complicating present. Some of the sections were published as standalone essays in magazines. Several others, which were not published, were often written for magazines but killed by editors who were less certain about how they would be received. During one of the years she was writing the book, Witt made more money from magazine kill fees than she did from work that was published.

Reviews were positive and Witt was praised for having her finger on the pulse of a moment. Ironically, just when many were looking to Witt to better understand how to navigate the newly-technologically-mediated world of singledom, Witt found herself falling in love. She met Andrew through the Bushwick techno scene at roughly the same time she was getting ready to publish Future Sex and begin work on her second book, a commissioned work on Nigerian cinema. Andrew made electronic music, worked in tech, and was already more enmeshed in the scene with which Witt was becoming enamored. They met at a bar and immediately hit it off.

“He had read an advance copy of my book and said that a line had stuck out at him,” she writes early in Health and Safety. “It was the one that said that at the beginning of every relationship you already know how it will end. The dynamic was now established: my watchfulness, his reclusion. We would figure that out later.”

*

Subcultures of all sorts had long been an interest for Witt. Her curiosity in them peaked as the allure of another subculture, in which she had spent most of her late twenties, began to wane: the Brooklyn literary scene. Discovering raves, she writes,

was a break from the gloominess of my existing social circle.… These writers lived in south Brooklyn in a state of lamentation. Everyone wanted to be one of the names that glowed from the past, the cultural icons who had led interesting New York lives, but we no longer lived in a world where books or magazines held widespread attention. New York had become expensive and therefore boring. The medium we loved could no longer bring us the cultural prominence we desired.

“The writing” at the time, she continues, “was laden with hyperbole and false epiphany. It 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.”

Many of the writers she knew in New York—and she was, she stressed, eager not to generalize here; this was just her experience—felt they had lost some of the import of generations past and were, in spite of needing to remain relevant, in thrall to the past. The great longform magazine writers of the sixties and seventies had prestige, paying venues to impress their personalities upon their readership, and expense accounts underwritten by a seemingly endless stream of magazine advertising revenue. “I think the economic story is reflected in the writing,” she told me, noting that the era’s writers were afforded a prominence and a decadence that generations of literary writers since are simply shut out from. “My career has been defined by watching the sidewalk roll up behind me on almost every job that I’ve had.”

She had been ambivalent about whether to include this section in the book, she told me. It was not meant as a slight on her profession, of which she is proud, but as an observation of the milieu in which she’d found herself. “I do feel like I spent some years in my mid twenties and early thirties in a social scene that was very nostalgist, pretty hetero in nature, [and] in the end—though I wasn’t aware of it at the time—a little bit socially conservative, misogynistic.”

Clubbing, and the scene evolving around it in Bushwick, felt exciting to Witt. It offered her a different kind of New York, a different vision for her life. She wanted, she realized, “to feel part of something that felt a little more forward-looking.” At a time when everyone was talking about the latest expensive cocktail bar or sceney restaurant, she was discovering a different side of New York and, for the first time, beginning to feel at home in the city.

This only became more important for her as the Trump presidency lumbered on. In 2018, when Witt began writing for the New Yorker, her first assignment was a piece on the survivors of the Parkland high school shooting. Later assignments took her to the border states to cover immigration, for which she spoke to many residents who appeared to care more about imagined crime caused by immigrants than about American children being regularly murdered at schools.

“The political reporting I was doing didn’t make any sense to me,” Witt told me, “and yet I had to go out and act like I could get some explanation about what was happening. I had to adopt a journalistic tone of authority when, meanwhile, like everyone else in the country, I was like: What is happening? I don’t understand what is happening, and why does it feel so violent?” The mood in the country was souring further, and the optimism available at the time—the kind that corporations like to gesture toward as a means of vapid moral exhibitionism—felt even more alienating to Witt: “Everyone was selling something, all of the time.”

Brooklyn—and specifically the parties she would go to at Bossa Nova Civic Club, Sublimate, Sugar Hill Disco, Knockdown Center—gave her, in her own words, “a place to refer to” in her mind while reporting around a country that was becoming more polarized and aggressively incongruous. Returning home and going to raves with friends, or even showing up to Bossa alone on a quiet weekday night to listen to some house music, surrounded by people whose politics are made irrelevant by the setting and the substances they’re consuming, was a salve. For her, these spaces felt like when “people get to be themselves, and not in just some corny, corporate advertising way, but people expressing themselves—their body, their gender.” The scene had a generally anti–social media ethos which meant that people got to be themselves or experiment—with their gender, sexuality, or even with not being themselves—for a night.

Witt’s interest in the scene was as much driven by her interest in drugs as in the music, as well as her desire to write about both. She had been fearful and avoidant of drugs as a teenager, but began taking an interest in them in her twenties. She had spent a significant chunk of her adulthood on Wellbutrin, an antidepressant, but, by her thirties, she stopped taking it and replaced it with psychedelics and party drugs. She was developing an interest which married a personal curiosity in substances with her journalistic impulse to document some of the subcultures and scenes around which they revolved. This latter impulse had to be balanced with a respect for the scene’s wishes to remain unpublicized.

As Witt points out, drugs not only complemented the music; they were (for the duration of a party, at least) unifying swathes of New Yorkers in inclusive spaces—basements, lofts, parks, or parking lots—throughout the city as the country around them became less tolerant. Raving, as Witt points out in the book, was not necessarily an act of political resistance (though it could be) but, during those days, simply a way of connecting with herself and others while temporarily damming the brutal flow of reality, of American carnage. If it has an air of the last days of Rome about it, it’s because it was, explicitly, purposefully hedonistic. “You could meditate for a lifetime or you could reset the computer in a single night with some drugs,” Witt writes.

An “extreme kind of fun” is how she described it to me when we discussed rave culture’s public perception. She gave the example of running ultramarathons as another type of extreme fun—which causes far greater strain on your body—but which is coded as more socially acceptable. “We were there to dissolve our identities,” Witt writes. “I don’t want to give the impression that we had to be high to enjoy the party, but the euphoria we calibrated in ourselves through the careful and considered manipulation of drugs was in pursuit of a glimpse of our best selves, which we achieved through means that some might consider an ordeal, a pushing against the limitations of wakefulness and consciousness.”

*

Toward the end of the book, as the couple begins spending all of their time at home during the lockdown, Witt notices the tension between herself and Andrew sharpening. With all of the usual outlets—seeing friends, going to clubs—unavailable, Andrew spends more and more time stoned, making music alone in his studio in their apartment. At one point, Witt and Andrew attend a Black Lives Matter protest in The Bronx, where police kettle in and violently assault the protesters (the City would later pay out $10,000 to each of the protesters who were beaten). In the melee, Witt shows her press badge and is spared a beating. Andrew, who is up at the front, doesn’t get off as lightly, gets thrashed by police, and spends a night in Queens Central Booking. When he returns home, things take on a new, inexplicably aggressive edge. Andrew blames and berates Witt for choosing to use her press pass. “Hide behind journalistic objectivity so you don’t have to take a stance,” he says to her. “Flash your press card while Black people get beaten in front of you.”

In Witt’s interpretation, Andrew is traumatized by the experience. He locks himself away in his studio and smokes even more heavily, accuses Witt of abusing him, and starts to believe that she wants to destroy his belongings and his life. Their fights worsen: Witt kicks a hole in a door, Andrew locks her out one night and she sleeps in her car. Witt feels not only like her reality is disintegrating, but that Andrew is a threat to her. Witt, hair falling out from stress, is still hopeful that this phase might pass—and still to some degree unsure and in denial about what was happening—delayed telling friends. As soon as she does, they advise her to pack a bag and leave immediately.

In some senses, the rapid disintegration of a shared reality among the American public could make it harder to recognize and comprehend the disintegration of one’s private life. Witt’s life was falling apart mostly for reasons unrelated to the pandemic, in a way she wasn’t equipped to process on her own, at the very moment when the country’s collective confusion and grief was becoming sacrosanct, inadvertently demoting her unrelated, private grief to a footnote. For many, including Witt, that summer was a breaking point—it was the idea that things could never get this bad, meeting the reality that they already had, quicker than anyone had anticipated.

The political fracturing of that summer, which was exacerbated by the Trump administration’s violent response to the George Floyd protests and its inept, dishonest response to the severity of the pandemic, introduced a broad swath of Americans to both the lies and callousness that the country usually reserved for its foreign policy. Witt believes that the slow erosion of a shared reality, the degradation of truth and language, and the gaslighting now synonymous with the Trump era, hasn’t gone away. When we spoke, Joe Biden was still two weeks away from dropping out of the election despite bipartisan calls to do so. For Witt, this was just another instance of a society lying to itself.

“It’s kind of happening right now,” she said. “I feel like a lot of what I was mapping in the book was like, we’re looking at something—we’re looking at Gaza getting bombed, we’re looking at Joe Biden’s state of mind—and we’re being told it’s fine. And it’s like, no, we’re seeing something with our own eyes.”

*

The comedown, when it arrived in late 2020, did not just bring with it the end of a relationship and to the scene around which she’d organized her social life. It foreclosed any chance that her life would ever adhere to the standard social script of partnering up, getting married, having a kid, and settling down. “I knew people close to me—especially those who had not understood this season of my life from the outset—could look for a cause for what had happened to me and find it in the drugs that I used,” Witt writes toward the end of Health and Safety. “It would be almost formulaic to say that 2020 was a comeuppance and that my having ended up childless and alone in my forties was an outcome I had engineered in pursuing my messy life.”

Witt’s breakup, which came just as she was turning 40, compelled her to not only reevaluate the past decade of her life, but recalibrate her expectations for what might follow. By the end of the book, the identity and life she’d invested in has evaporated, and the questions she tried to answer in Future Sex regarding monogamy, life partners, the idea of having children or a family, become newly urgent.

On the day we spoke, J.D. Vance had just been named as Donald Trump’s vice-presidential nominee. For someone like Vance, Witt explained, “being married and having children is the right way to live and it offers you safety and protection and comfort and happiness and [is] the only way to be in the world. That has never worked for me. I don’t know how much of it is choice, how much of it is circumstance. Except that I’ve always been aware that I’m not alone.”

Health and Safety ends, in the spring of 2021, on an ambivalent note. The country is once more on standby as it awaits the trial of Derek Chauvin, the cop who a year earlier kneeled on George Floyd’s neck until he killed him. Joe Biden was several months into his Presidency. Over half a million people had died in the U.S. from Covid, which was still surging, but mask mandates were being dropped and many people had simply stopped caring. The world had not ended, but it had changed. The clubs had opened their doors, but something felt different for Witt. She went back on Wellbutrin but found it no longer worked. Then she went back to drugs, which did work, at least in helping her forget about the past 12 months.

Just as doubt begins creeping in about the scene and her place in it, Witt finds herself back in Detroit on Labor Day weekend, for Techno Thanksgiving, when tens of thousands house and techno enthusiasts descend on Motor City for Movement (formerly Detroit Electronic Music Festival) and various off-site parties. She attends No Way Back, a 14-hour, techno-heavy party (named, I presume, in honor of the classic Chicago house track by Adonis), which Witt describes as “the maximization of an LSD trip and the culmination of generational wisdom into best practices for an environment in which to fully lose your mind.”

There, the last moments of the book are dedicated to a haunting dancefloor vision of America’s heartland as a land despoiled, changed utterly and irrevocably by the forces of technology and greed, as well as a realization that the ways which have served us for centuries might not necessarily belong to the future. There would be no more pastoral, Witt told me. No more factories, no more marriage, or even a biologically-ordained body.

What would come next, she didn’t know, but she seemed resolute in her commitment to uncertainty: there would be no way back.