Chronicle of a childless cat lady

When historians try to understand how leftist elites lost their way, "Health and Safety: A Breakdown" - a memoir by New Yorker writer and LSD/ecstasy/cocaine fan Emily Witt - will be an ur-text.

Pity the joyless wastrel.

In September, the extremely lefty New Yorker writer Emily Witt¹ released a 264-page autobiography called “Health and Safety: A Breakdown,” chronicling her copious drug use and a doomed relationship with a man she calls “Andrew.”

Like most memoirs by wannabe intellectuals, Health and Safety is highly self-aware. Though, alas, not self-aware enough.

By her own description, during her thirties, Witt used enough drugs to fund a small cartel: cocaine, the amphetamine derivative known as ecstasy, ketamine, and every possible psychedelic. So many drugs! Such a good time! Lucky her, the funnel of addiction didn’t suck her down, and she emerged with her mind intact. (Her dislike for cannabis and apparent avoidance of opioids no doubt helped.)

Yet Witt did and does suffer from an addiction, one common among teenagers and twenty-somethings, but rarely seen in adults outside of New York or Los Angeles. She has a desperate jones to be the coolest.

She can’t just go out, she has to go to a rave; she can’t just go to a rave, she has to go to the right rave, one that ordinary club kids don’t know about; she can’t just go to the right rave, she has to be on the perfect mix of drugs while she’s there.

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(No drugs required for Unreported Truths addicts!)

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Witt is judgmental beyond imagining. Not even her fellow white lefty Brooklynites - a pretty judgmental bunch themselves - are good enough. Here she writes about Park Slope, a Brooklyn district that just voted for Kamala Harris by roughly 10-1:

I hated the neighborhood. Smugness oozed from its leaves and blossoms. I would watch the privileged children of Park Slope walk to their segregated public school each morning with their BPA-free bento boxes packed with seaweed snacks and feel unreasonable disdain… I saw suburban upbringings all around me, and the fantasy of city life made tolerable to the small-minded because all the difference had been priced out of it... There was nowhere to go out at night.

Did I mention Witt is from Minnesota?

“The fantasy of city life?” Only an outsider could fight so hard for the particular fantasy Witt unspools, only someone not from New York could fail to understand that it is a real place filled with almost 9 million people. Newsflash, most of those people aren’t cool. They don’t spend their time bouncing between clubs in Berlin and sex parties in San Francisco and figuring out exactly how many micrograms of LSD to take for the perfect trip.

Mostly they root for the Knicks² and hope they don’t have to deal with anyone screaming at them on the A train after work. Mostly they wish their kids can get a halfway decent education and the sun will be shining in Orlando when they go to Disney.

New York’s great, it’s unique, it’s a fantastic idea with an incredible skyline. But let’s be honest, it stinks as an actual place to live a lot of the time for people not making millions of dollars a year. The city is expensive and grimy and loud. Every once in a while a homeless guy stabs someone to death on the street. (It happened Monday.) The apartments are small, the taxes are high. Most regular not-rich people leave it if they can when they have kids. They used to move to Long Island. Now they move to Raleigh.

You have to be truly in love with yourself and your idea of New York not to see this reality. Witt is.

And of course her daytime politics are the flipside of her late-night fantasies, her demand for artificial perfection drives both. She’s roughly 35 when the book starts, 40 when it ends, but at heart she’s a mean girl - politically and culturally - now and forever.

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(Cool cover. Of course it is.)

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Witt’s not just a Democrat.

Democrats live in Park Slope and send their kids to good public schools, see? Democrats stink. Witt’s a defund-the-police, trans-women-are-women, they’re-not-eating-the-cats-and-Gawd-bless-’em-if-they-are, it’s-their-choice progressive.

And Witt doesn’t have kids, of course she doesn’t, so she doesn’t have to worry about sacrificing them on the altar of a bad public school.

It should go without saying that living this way is exhausting.

Of course Witt’s cool hunt extends to the choice of her partner. She’s tall and pretty and has big dark eyes and she wrote a book called Future Sex. So the boys like her, but she is picky picky. She dumps “Matt” - of whom she writes, “nothing Matt did or thought mattered anymore because I would never see him again” - and moves onto, and in with, with “Andrew.”

You will not be surprised to hear that Andrew is a DJ and super-cool and they go to lots of raves and have lots of great sex. The best sex! Because they’re the coolest, and they don’t have kids to bother them, so they can hang out and… enjoy each other’s company… all day in their cool new apartment after they party. With his cat.

They agree to an open relationship, because those always work. But Witt doesn’t want anyone but Andrew even when she gets hit on when she’s high, because he looks like a cross between John Lennon and Jesus.

Then Covid messes everything up. Covid, and Donald Trump, and/or all the drugs Andrew’s doing. They can’t go to raves, so he sits around smoking cannabis all day every day and starts to lose his mind. Then Witt takes him to a protest where he gets arrested and he really loses his mind.

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(Finding the truth in leftist memoirs. For under 20 cents a day.)

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So Witt claims, anyway.

And here the depth of her thoughtless privilege really becomes evident.

“Andrew” is a pseudonym, but the real Andrew is easily findable - I won’t explain how, but he is. In Witt’s telling, he’s a DJ with a trust fund who does even more drugs than she does. Maybe. He’s also gainfully employed at a technology company and was working even during nearly the entire period of Witt describes. He’s sober now too, or so he says.

Does Andrew have a side of the story? Of course. (Almost) every story has two sides. But Witt presents him as a drug-addled monster. She makes sure to let us know that he was briefly psychiatrically hospitalized after they broke up (and she contacted a psychiatric helpline about him).

She calls him as manic, and a single footnote explains that he “told a fact-checker… he was eventually diagnosed as having bipolar disorder.” Cannabis can also worsen manic episodes, though neither Witt nor Andrew connects his mania to his use.

I contacted Andrew, who does in fact look a little like a cross between John Lennon and Jesus, to ask what he thought of his portrayal in the book. He declined to comment. I can’t blame him.

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Emily Witt would like to think of herself as a tireless fighter for - and speaker for - the voiceless. She told one interviewer that when she covered the mostly peaceful George Floyd riots:

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.

But when it comes to the most important romantic relationship of her life, Emily Witt is happy to be the only one talking, to speak for Andrew without his consent. (She writes near the end of the book that they have not been in touch since late 2020, when he wrote, “I cannot ever be near you again.”)

She trashes him — in the most woke way possible — by pointing to his “Trumpian logic” and claiming he “spoke not with his own words but in the borrowed vocabulary of racism and trauma.” (Bad Andrew! Bad!)

For Witt, charity, and self-awareness, end at home.

Meanwhile, four years later, she has a brand-spanking new book to show for her trouble, and at 43, she’s back doing drugs and staying up late at raves. One day, she’ll find the perfect party, and the perfect politics.

Try not to judge her. Though she’ll be judging you.

1. Typical Witt article: “How Greta Thunberg Turned Existential Dread Into a Movement.”

2. As a Nets fan, I’m pained to admit this, but it’s true. Nothing brings New York together like the Knicks.