Culture
Book Review: ‘How to Be Well,’ by Amy Larocca
HOW TO BE WELL: Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time, by Amy Larocca
Oh, the irony of cracking open “How to Be Well” while on vacation in Italy. There, on an island off the coast of Naples, a breakfast buffet included three varieties of tiramisu. Wine was poured not to a stingy fingertip’s depth but from a bottomless carafe — at lunchtime, no less. And when stores closed in observance of an afternoon siesta, the only people on the streets were American tourists, jogging. (I was on the prowl for a postage stamp because, yes, I still send postcards.)
It was from this place of abundance and balance that I followed Amy Larocca, a veteran journalist, into the hellscape of stringent food plans, cultish exercise routines and medical quackery that have, over the past decade or so, constituted healthy living in some of the wealthiest enclaves of the United States. Blame social media, political turmoil or the pandemic — no matter how you slice it, the view is dispiriting. But Larocca’s tour is a lively one, full of information and humor.
The book begins with a colonic, “the flossing of the wellness world,” Larocca writes. We find the author herself on an exam table, “white-knuckled and curled up like a baby shrimp, naked from the waist down.” She recalls her doctor’s disapproval of the procedure — a sort of power washing of the colon — and its risks, including rectal perforation, juxtaposed with one woman’s claim that a colonic made her feel like she could fly, like it was “rinsing out the corners of her psyche.”
Where did we get the idea that the body — specifically a woman’s body — is unclean inside? A problem to be solved? And how did the concept of wellness bloom “like a rash,” Larocca writes, into a $5.6 trillion global industry?
These are the questions she seeks to answer, using data, history, medicine, pop culture and her own experience. She parses fads and trends, clean beauty and athleisure wear, the gospel of SoulCycle and the world according to Goop. She weighs the advantages and disadvantages of micro-dosing and biohacking. She too goes to Italy, where she attends a Global Wellness Summit featuring a spandex and sneaker fashion show and a presentation on ending preventable chronic disease the world over.
At times, Larocca seems to approach her own subject with the same sweep. The second half of “How to Be Well” reads like a survey course, cramming the industry’s relationship to politics, men and the environment into single chapters when each could fill a whole semester. As for why meditation merits more real estate than vaccines, I can only assume that the book was already at the printer when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed as health secretary.
But when Larocca goes deep, as she does on self-care, body confidence and sex positivity, she’s at her best — authoritative and witty, personal without being chummy.
She debunks the cockamamie but persistent notion that “feeling old is not an inevitable byproduct of aging but something easily avoided by paying attention.” (And by forking over gobs of cash; more on this shortly.) After attending an Oprah-sponsored conference on menopause, a subject Larocca has covered for The New York Times, she realizes that “aging is different from disease” and “isn’t necessarily something to be cured,” let alone through “neat, tidy, attainable solutions.”
Then there’s the sneaky rebranding of old-school dieting for “detoxification,” another wolf in sheep’s clothing. Think fasting, juicing, abstaining from all manner of verboten foods. Even if the professed endgame is “glow,” Larocca makes clear, “part of the promise is still, always, to rid us of a bit of ourselves.”
And finally, refreshingly, she’s honest about the money at stake for the wellness-industrial complex — not just for stylists turned wellness coaches or models turned nutritionists, but for massive corporations cashing in on an age of worry.
“None of these institutions is nonprofit; none of these institutions is altruistic at its core,” Larocca writes, in a passage reminiscent of Carol Channing’s monologue from “Free to Be You and Me,” in which she reminded us that happy people doing housework on TV tend to be paid actors.
“It is their job to persuade me to come back,” Larocca continues, “to spend more money on what they’ve got to give, to serve their investors, to serve themselves.”
And that, as “How to Be Well” wisely shows us, is the bottom line.
HOW TO BE WELL: Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time | By Amy Larocca | Knopf | 291 pp. | $28
Part of Clark’s subtlety is the way in which the category of “what Suzanna refuses to know” remains undefined. Is it, as her grandmother would have it, full comprehension of her mother’s crime? Is it the realm of cold hard facts in general? Or is it nothing less than her own personhood, what with Suzanna’s self-curtailing commitment to remaining within visiting distance of the hill? Whatever the case, Suzanna’s mode of consciousness seems to grant her less quantifiable, more precious forms of knowledge. Even into her teenage years there’s a visionary quality to the way she experiences the world — as if she were a tiny, strange saint of a religion of her own devising.
All this numinousness isn’t to say that Clark can’t also be very droll. Consider, for example, the flock of captious old Commie dowagers who surround the grandmother and on whom Suzanna waits, obediently dispensing gin. These ostensible friends like to ask one another things like, “Remember, Sylvie, when you were a Nazi?”
Clark’s gifts for both the comic and the visionary reach their peak in a virtuoso, semi-hallucinatory passage toward the end of the novel. Facing death, the grandmother enlists Suzanna’s help in burning her personal effects. Even her wig is destined for the pyre — a wastebasket on the terrace. As Suzanna dutifully tosses it into the flames, an unholy vision presents itself: “The wig rose right out of the basket of its own accord, never seeming more like human hair than it did in that instant, hovering before us, burning, presenting itself, then sweeping over the railing, caught on its own fierce wind.”
Soon, with the wig transfigured into a kind of premature ghost of its owner, “my grandmother is looking at me and she is telling me everything: about her mother, her mother’s hair. …” The pages that follow, conjuring the affective lives of generations of women, are both dreamlike and the most exhilaratingly all-seeing of the book. In this sense, Suzanna is wide awake.
THE HILL | By Harriet Clark | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 276 pp. | $27
She was blond and he was dark-haired; they were almost photonegatives. She looked as if she’d been in Bergman films. He was, visually, America’s Camus — wary, heavy-lidded, wreathed in cigarillo smoke, an intellectual turned out in black Levi’s and sheepskin-lined leather jackets.
Hustvedt and Auster’s double-barreled impact could prompt strange reactions. Before their wedding dinner, Hustvedt writes, a poet friend of Paul’s lifted a glass and said, “To the bride and groom, two people so good-looking I’d like to slice their faces with a razor.” Hustvedt wasn’t surprised when he slowly faded from their lives.
Auster was diagnosed with cancer in January 2023, when he was 75. Hustvedt tells the story of his illness — the chaotic E.R. visits, the hair loss, the shrinking and then metastasizing of his tumor, the wracking immunotherapy, the wheelchairs, the inability to write and the gradual loss of language — largely by reprinting the matter-of-fact group emails she sent to close friends to keep them apprised of his progress.
These sorts of missives, as anyone who has written or received them knows, are an art form of their own. When delivering good news, Hustvedt urged caution. “There is an important difference between optimism and hope,” she wrote in one such email. “The optimist’s tendency to cheer every piece of good news and predict a good outcome is understandable but creates emotional swings that, at least for those who love the patient, are unsustainable. Hope, on the other hand, is necessary for living on.”
Auster was stoic about his illness, but restless and held captive in the borderless region he termed “Cancerland.” No longer able to write fiction, near his death he began to compose a series of letters to his grandson. These letters, which are largely about family history, are printed here and are models of that form: warm, direct, undogmatic.
Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s challenge is focused on unfinished novels that their authors didn’t live to see published. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
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