Health and safety A breakdown

New Yorker staff writer Witt (Nollywood) delivers an arresting memoir rife with techno music, drugs, and the blush of new romance. In 2013, after quitting antidepressants, Witt decided to try "as many psychedelic drugs as possible," her curiosity piqued by shifting social attitudes toward the substances. A solo trip to an ayahuasca ceremony in the Catskills netted her a boyfriend and a starting point, and she spent the next three years documenting her experiences on LSD, MDMA, and psilocybin while working on her first book, Future Sex. Then, in 2016, after a breakup and a move to Bushwick, Brooklyn, Witt fell in with a new social scene and got a new boyfriend, Andrew, who took her to forest raves and industrial techno shows. As the events of 2016--including the presidential election, mass shootings, and climate disasters--made Witt's days as a journalist ever bleaker, she sought to counteract the gloom with nights out dancing. the Covid pandemic hit in 2020, Witt's release valve vanished thanks to lockdown measures, causing her relationship with Andrew to disintegrate along with her faith in the social fabric. 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. Agent: Edward Orloff, McCormick Literary. (Sept.)

Sardonic memoir of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll in the time of Trump.New Yorker staff writer Witt opens by wondering aloud what a given day in 2016 might hold: a writing assignment, perhaps, or yet another mass shooting, or "something…that would indicate the arrival of a new historical epoch, a sign that we were living in an era of meaning and purpose that would be remembered for many decades to come." Alas, it's life as usual, which requires tempering reality. Witt elaborates: first she spent a couple of years on the antidepressant Wellbutrin, which "confirmed my love of stimulants." Then there was cocaine, readily available on the New York party circuit, until, in 2013, she "decided to try as many psychedelic drugs as possible." Her pharmacopeia won't threaten Hunter Thompson's crown, but the drugs flow in torrents for a few years: "As a straight white girl from the Midwest, the archetype of the nerdy midwestern acid freak from the land of crust punks and wooks was an established role I could comfortably inhabit." Against this backdrop, Witt leads a complicated love life, the most stable episode of which descends into literal madness on the part of a boyfriend alternately paranoid and potentially violent. She is back on Wellbutrin when Trump, whom she's covered as a journalist, enters the White House: "I didn't need to do drugs anymore. There were no more parties to go to." Her return to medication (as opposed to recreational drugs) coincides with that ugly moment when fascism becomes fashion--she prepares herself by reading stacks of books on Europe in the 1930s--and then Covid-19 shuts down the world. The double-edged title notwithstanding, Witt's bleakly brilliant book is about a time when both health and safety are rare--and getting rarer. Self-eviscerating, honest, often painful--a superbly realized chronicle of an ever-darkening age. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.