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.
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