MARK JUDGE: A New Yorker writer’s mesmerizing new memoir fails to learn lessons about drugs, love, and life.
Near the end of her brilliantly written new memoir Health and Safety: A Breakdown, author Emily Witt offers this observation: “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. 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 a messy life. Our behavior had been antisocial, and look how it had ended.”
This seems to be an epiphany. But then Witt retreats: “On a bad day I could almost convince myself to frame my story this way, too. Almost, but not for very long.”
That’s a shame because accepting the truth would probably give Witt some serenity. She deserves it.
Health and Safety is the story of a dazzlingly bright person who made a wrong turn, got into drugs, and suffered for it. Just admitting that could bring her peace.
I’m reasonably certain that as awful as the year was, the horrors of 2020 weren’t engineered simply to be a “comeuppance” for the bad life choices made by a New Yorker writer — and I’m pretty sure Rick Blaine would agree.