When I met the writer Amy Larocca at a cafe in the Boerum Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn on a recent afternoon, I could not help but notice: She had the glow. Or seemed to.
The glow, as Ms. Larocca explains in her new book, “How to Be Well: Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time,” is what happens when you purify yourself “from the inside out.” When you never miss a day of your skin care routine, regularly drain your lymphatic fluids and take your collagen supplements. But to truly glow, you must also practice mindfulness, self-care and, ideally, transcendental meditation, avoid processed junk and sleep at least eight hours every night.
Such are the exacting standards of a contemporary wellness culture that has swelled to encompass nearly every facet of life. Not just the serums we slather on our faces or the Pilates classes we scurry off to but the food we eat (always whole foods), the bowel movements we pass (must be “firm and beautifully formed”) and the very thoughts we let enter our minds (intentional ones only).
It sounds like a lot of work. Or one might say it sounds like a lot of work — if it were not so incumbent on a well woman to be perpetually at ease.
After talking to Ms. Larocca, 49, for an hour, I learned she did not do everything a well woman should. She tries to sleep a lot. She exercises regularly. And yes, she wears an Oura ring, the latest in wearable tech for tracking one’s blood oxygen rate, body temperature and other biometrics.
But she does not observe 12-step routines of any kind. She is aware of the fact that dry-brushing may be a great way to exfoliate but that it probably does not drain your lymphatic fluid.
Sometimes, she participates in what she calls “recreational wellness,” something she knows is not likely to achieve what it promises but that nonetheless brings her some form of pleasure. Ms. Larocca, who spent 20 years at New York magazine in various roles including fashion director, is no stranger to the intensely human draw to believe that some of these practices will give her a control over her life and her body that she knows is fundamentally unattainable — which may be the emotional core of our wellness obsession.
This conversation, which took place over a matcha latte and an iced green tea, has been edited for length and clarity.
Going into your book, I had a much more narrow view of what wellness was. But I was compelled by your more capacious understanding of this world.
Wellness is really silly exercise classes. It’s also underserved communities talking about how no one takes their health seriously. We can talk about the way the beauty industry uses wellness as a “get-out-of-jail-free” card when it wants to pretend it’s feminist. We can talk about weird colonic therapists. We can talk about wellness as a socially acceptable term for eating disorders. There are 90 million ways to have a wellness conversation. In the end, I tried to say, wellness is all of this and we just live in this messed-up soup.
At this point, it seems hard to draw any firm boundaries around wellness.
Sometimes you see this when you go to these new medical practices. You’re like, “Am I at a spa? A gym? A boutique hotel? At the doctor? In a Kate Hudson movie?”
You started this book before Covid. How was your idea of wellness shaped by the pandemic?
It quickly became clear who was getting sick and who was dying from Covid. So the concept that was driving the project — coming at it from the perspective of someone who has written about fashion and style all these years — was that wellness had become this thing where we’re being sold our own bodies with the same marketing techniques that people use to sell handbags or shoes or lipstick. It’s incredibly dangerous to live in a society that treats health like a luxury product.
I liked that you pointed out some of the inconsistencies contained within wellness culture. At one point, you mention the concept of a single well-intentioned cigarette — a little indulgence.
It’s because all of these things reside within privilege. There’s a term, the narcissism of small differences. The things that make someone unwell are so much bigger than whatever little wellness protocol. They’re these larger socioeconomic factors.
Something I was thinking about as I read was the gendered aspect of wellness, and wellness as a kind of bonding exercise among women — sharing your insecurities, how you want to self-improve, these personal routines.
I think it can be. Going to an exercise class with friends or to a spa — it’s definitely a bonding ritual for a lot of people. There are wellness social clubs, like Remedy Place. It can also be a form of entertainment or recreation. It’s just a question of understanding its position and your expectations. It’s important to say here: It’s not like I hate wellness. I also participate in a lot of it. I think wellness is too entrenched in our lives to be “pro” or “anti.”
I love the term “recreational wellness.” It seems to relate to an experience I often have, which is knowing something is not going to work but doing it anyway.
It’s a diversion. I exercise a lot — part of it is for recreation, part of it is for actual health. I used to do my red light stuff and drink my collagen. Now I’ve sort of whittled it down. Every once in a while, a friend of mine will call me and be like, “My life has been changed by bovine colostrum!” And I’m like, “I need bovine colostrum!”
Recently, I was in a pharmacy filled with beautiful skin care products in an upscale part of Los Angeles. I knew I did not need anything, but I wanted it. And an elegant woman was floating around the store offering to help customers find what suited them.
It can really make you feel cared for and cosseted. It can feel really nice!
I thought about how it would feel to have all of these things in my medicine cabinet. I would feel like one of the fancy women walking around this neighborhood. Which goes back to the luxury aspect.
It’s the same feeling of, “if I purchase this bag. …”
Why is the pull so strong? We often know consciously that these products are not going to do what they say they will.
Wouldn’t it be so great if they did, though? And in the absence of credible information from actual experts, there’s this incredible opportunity. We want it to be true, and there’s a loss of faith in the systems that are supposed to be protecting us and informing us. And it’s on the left and the right. A lot of the Moon Juice products and the Infowars supplements have some of the same types of ingredients. The message on both sides is, “Prepare yourself for the collapse of the world! Wellness will save us from these terrible inevitabilities!”
Something about knowing that there is so much snake oil and bad information out there can also amplify the feeling that somewhere, hidden among these thousands of products, are maybe the two or three that “actually work.”
Totally! I’m like, “Sometime, one of these Bobbi Brown emails is going to have that tip!” And what if that was the time I didn’t click?
