New Yorker Writer's Memoir: Close And Yet So Far

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.”

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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.

Ed Morrissey

It is extraordinarily difficult to get past this level of cognitive dissonance. Mark's correct to credit Witt with getting as far as she does in recognizing the truth, but close ends up only counting in horseshoes and hand grenades. 

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