Breaking Awake: A Reporter’s Search for a New Life, and a New World, Through Drugs

In this shrewd if scattered memoir, journalist Moskowitz (The Case Against Free Speech) calls out the prevailing cultural perception that “bad people use drugs, good people are prescribed medications.” After suffering a breakdown following their reporting on the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., Moskowitz sought relief through drug, talk, and alternative therapies. Here, they offer an unsettling glimpse into the pharmaceutical industry’s marketing of antidepressants, but fact-based reporting soon gives way to the book’s main theme: “We are a society wholly dependent on drugs to quell the misery that capitalism inflicts on people.” To support this idea, Moskowitz interviews friends and other subjects cherry-picked from DMs and emails they’ve received from their readers, whose intriguing perspectives nevertheless fail to represent a broad enough sample size to support the central argument. More effective is Moskowitz’s own push-pull relationship with illicit substances—as they glance at a drugged-out dance floor, they “vacillate between thinking that everyone here has figured out the solution to life, and feeling like I want to put every single one of them into rehab.” In the end, Moskowitz’s elegant writing can’t save this muddled manifesto. Agent: Melissa Flashman, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Sept.)