Amy Larocca and Gaby Wood: ‘How to Be Well’

London Review Bookshop Podcast

Amy Larocca discusses her book How to Be Well, examining the $3.7 trillion wellness industry's evolution from a fashion-like status symbol into a complex market driven by

Key takeaways

• Larocca traces modern wellness to 18th-century French aristocracy and 1930s German life reform movements, noting how purity culture later fractured into fascist ideologies and California hippie health stores.
• The $3.7 trillion industry functions as a new luxury status marker, replacing traditional fashion brands with supplements, extreme protocols, and exclusive retreats.

Main topics

• History and evolution of the wellness industry
• Purity culture and political extremism

Notable quotes

"The short answer to how to be well is affluence. Yeah, it's be rich."

Conclusion

Larocca's work serves as a critical yet empathetic guide for navigating the

Transcript preview

Speaker 8 (0:02) Welcome to the London Review Bookshop podcast. To find out about our upcoming events, visit londonreviewbookshop.co.uk forward slash events. Speaker 5 (0:12) Thank you all very much for coming to the London Review Bookshop this evening, where we gather to celebrate Amy LaRocka and her new book, How To Be Well, published by Bedford Square Publishers. Thank you to them. Speaker 4 (0:25) Woo! Speaker 4 (0:28) Thank you, Amy. Speaker 5 (0:30) I'm looking forward to this. Me too. And thank you also to Gabby Wood, who's here to be in conversation with Amy. And they've already started their chat apparently, but we'll ask them to rewind a bit and start again. Yeah, you're just interrupting us. I'm so Speaker 1 (0:42) sorry. Speaker 5 (0:44) I'll keep the interruption to a minimum. Speaker 5 (0:48) Our guests are going to talk for about 45 minutes. There'll be time for questions. I think that's it for me. Now it's time for the good bit. Amy, Gabby, thank you so much. Thank you. Speaker 6 (0:57) Thank you. Speaker 6 (1:02) Well, I mean, many of you will be here because you already know Amy, although we have noticed some actual strangers in the house. So thank you very much. And all of you will be here because you know about the book. So I don't need to tell you very much. But I do want to say, just by way of background slightly, that Amy, once the very influential fashion director of New York magazine. became expert, as you mentioned in this book, at noticing the internal and external forces that make us want to be a certain way, which I think is a very good description of, in a way, the seeds of this book. Amy's also written for the New York Times, who will come to, again, a very influential story that she wrote about the menopause industry later, and Vogue and the London Review of Books, partly why we're here. This book is very like Amy. It's funny. It's observant, it's effortlessly erudite, I think, and it's capable, as you'll know from looking at Amy's shoes, of identifying in minor details the signs of a major societal shift. Someone who heard Amy read from this book recently told me that she thought she was the new Nora Ephron. So you can imagine how delighted I am to call her my friend and to introduce you to her this evening. Speaker 5 (2:20) I think the main Speaker 6 (2:21) thing that we need to set here is the tone. The book is called How to Be Well. I think lots of people thought when you spoke about it at first, you know, is this a guidebook? Is it a satire? You know, how big a dose of irony is there in the title and in the premise? Can you situate us a bit? Yeah, Speaker 3 (2:41) the tone was a really complicated thing with this project. It started, I started it before COVID. And at that point, I was still working at New York Magazine where I wrote, I was the fashion director, but I also wrote a lot about the kind of, as Gabby said, the forces that make us want. things, want to be a certain way, look a certain way, participate in a certain trend or not participate in that trend. And I felt very strongly that wellness was kind of supplanting fashion as the kind of aspirational hit of choice. It had something to do with the gates of fashion being far more open than they'd ever been previously. And once that happens, people are like, well, what's got a nice closed gate? Because I want to be there. And that's a very fashion person tendency was that like, OK, if some weirdo can stream the Prada show from his basement, then the Prada show has lost value to me. But there's a guy who will like wash your blood in a basement in Milan. Like, I want to know that. So it became this really kind of aspirational industry. There was an interview with a woman named Amanda Chantal Bacon, who's like the sort of celebrity juicer in L.A. And she there was an interview with her in Elle magazine in which she talked about her morning routine. And usually those morning routines like, oh, I meditate. I like have my coffee, whatever. Hers was bananas. It was like I had not heard of a single thing she consumed, except for that. Like at one point she consumed ground up pearls out of like a hand pounded copper cup. And she's very beautiful and she lives in Montecito. And it was suddenly like, oh, this is the new language of aspiration. Everyone now knows how to pronounce Loewe or Schiaparelli. So that is no longer desirable. We need ashwagandha. We need wushu dust and all this other stuff Amanda Chanel Bacon is eating. And I am not eating. Consuming? I don't even know what form she takes it in. Impaling. So I felt like, okay, this is sort of ripe for a kind of New York Magazine style, longer project that kind of sends up this whole world. And that's how it started. And it was quite arch, I would say, in the beginning. But as I went on working on the project, I realized like this topic isn't actually that arch. Of course, it's ridiculous and it's funny. And the stories of... some of these more extreme practitioners are really funny and deserve to be made fun of and sort of looked at in a humorous way. But COVID then happened. And at least in America, I realized like for the wellness people, it was like the rapture. They were like, I'm right and I'm not going to get sick. And they didn't, right? But that's also because the wellness people are all rich and white. And that was actually why they weren't getting sick, not because of the ground up pearl in the hand pounded copper cup. So it... became a bit more serious to me then and trying to figure out how to hold both truths at once, that it's both silly and serious, was the kind of project of the book. Because I think that's the position that Taking Care of Your Health has come to occupy for a lot of people and particularly for the women who it's being marketed to so aggressively, that it is both ridiculous, but at the same time, there's these very big, particularly in the U.S., differences in terms of how people are able to care for themselves. So Speaker 6 (6:08) that's a long answer about tone. No, no, that's great. But the project sort of evolved. But you do manage to balance those things because you get some very funny Speaker 5 (6:16) stories and Speaker 6 (6:17) a lot of history. I mean, maybe you can take us through that a little bit of how we got here, because I think certainly at the beginning of the book, you give a kind of causal account of Speaker 3 (6:27) the Speaker 6 (6:28) need for it or desire for it. Well, Speaker 3 (6:30) it's something that's been around forever. And, you know, I sort of had a great time reading about the history of wellness and the French kings and their, you know, mother of pearl enema tools and like how it's just. like the society ladies in the 18th century in France would have like a sort of display their high-end enema tools with beautiful you know I guess like anal like I don't know what they were but they were they were very expensive and um You know, one of the Louis's would have like colonics while he was receiving guests. Like it was like that was, you know, so it was like these kind of things, this desire to feel better has always existed. And it's always been connected to status. The ability to take care of yourself in a way that is sort of beyond the basics has always been a kind of signifier of status. When I got really interested, and again, I know you guys know what's happening to us in the U.S., but I was looking at this kind of recent round of it, and the closest parallel I found was in Germany, where there was what's, you know, like this sort of life reform movement, and it was the Kniep baths and the nudism and all of these kind of... wellness things, many of which are still around today, became really popular in the 1930s, 20s, and 30s in Germany. And then you had a split where some of the hardcore wellness practitioners were, in fact, Nazis. And what they were obsessed with was purity and this idea of purity that comes up so much in wellness. And this notion of detoxing yourself, detoxing your environment, has some... you know sort of disgusting implications if you carry it in one direction so there was a split in the buildings roman people who were the buildings roman i'm in a bookstore but in the in the um life reform people who Speaker 3 (8:26) became, some became fascists and really took this idea of purity and what it meant to be pure and live in a pure society in that direction. And some moved to California and became, opened the first health food stores ever, were called Nature Boys, and became hippies. And I realized this is sort of exactly what we have happening in the United States, where wellness is this place where the extreme left and the extreme right are meeting. In Germany, it was described as a response to the Industrial Revolution. I think now we can sort of describe it as a response to the digital revolution. The complaints are that our lives have been corrupted, moved away from like the sort of more natural way of being. Of course, you then get into, you know, the racial implications of that, immigration, what it is to be pure, what it is to be a clean person. And the parallels were really frightening. So, you know, especially in the U.S. where you again have the extreme left and the extreme right sort of coming together around this notion of purity. Speaker 6 (9:25) And also you do have percentages, you know, the percentage of white people who have access to health care and, you know. Speaker 3 (9:31) And yeah, I mean, Speaker 4 (9:33) and Speaker 3 (9:33) I felt like when COVID happened, I felt like, how are people not just burning this country down? The only wealthy white people who were dying were old. Speaker 6 (9:42) And Speaker 3 (9:42) then the poorer you got. And the less weight you got, the chances that you were going to get sick and die from COVID increased exponentially. And it was so clear that this sort of treating health as a luxury object, like treating it like an expensive handbag that you can purchase, was not working. You know, it hasn't changed anything, but it... It was so like the divide was so incredibly clear that the idea that these kind of wellness extras were what was making the difference was so ridiculous. It was so clearly access to basic medical care, food, water, you know, clean water, clean air, all these things that you don't have in. And also just higher like stress levels of living, which increase. Speaker 6 (10:33) Well, that's one of the things you say, you know, the short answer to how to be well is affluence. Yeah, it's be rich. Or privilege. Yeah, exactly. Don't Speaker 3 (10:39) be Speaker 6 (10:39) poor Speaker 3 (10:39) is how to be well is unfortunately the truth. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah, no, it's just it's incredibly clear what those lines are. And so when the sort of wellness obsessives talk about, well, it's because I took this weird herb, I took this. I mean, that's sort of like the truffle shavings on your pasta, right? It's like the meat. It's not the meal. Yeah. Speaker 6 (11:02) But it does also bring us to the question of what wellness is. You know, it's not just not being ill. Do you want to talk a bit about how you define that? Speaker 3 (11:10) Well, it's sort of been historically defined as not the absence of illness, but a sort of extra state on top of that, kind of extra health. Like, how un-sick can you be? So how, like, you know, it's not the absence of disease. It's not the absence of injury. It is something on top of that. So it's like once you get to base level, it's like, well, how sort of how much can I increase this state of being Speaker 2 (11:37) better, being sort of like a super person? Speaker 3 (11:39) And so that's sort of, I think, what wellness is. But because it's now a marketing term, it covers everything. And I mean, I have seen everything from like a checking account to described as wellness. Speaker 3 (11:51) to, you know, it's the nail salon, it says come in for wellness, self-care. So it's so broadly applied that it almost starts to lose meaning. Yeah. Speaker 6 (11:59) It's like the word story. Everything's a story. Speaker 3 (12:01) Yeah. Speaker 6 (12:03) But I know we have some men in the audience. I don't mean to offend you. But one of the things that was very striking to me about this is how, in a way, traditional medicine, particularly in the US, but maybe everywhere, has evolved in quite a sexist way. Speaker 3 (12:16) Oh, completely sexist way. I mean, there were sort of hormonal treatments that were tested for women that were tested only on men until, you know, the mid-80s. How does that work? It's so unclear. But any disease that is traditionally affected, any sort of minority or women is just under-researched. Like, so there's just so much been historically. And we're getting back to that now with all these. these cuts that we have in the U.S. for what are called discriminatory studies. So it's like if there's a medical study that applies to a minority group, it's called discriminatory. And they've all had their funding cut. So it's been any progress that's been made has really is being lost right now under RFK and this administration. But yeah, it's so one of the things is like there's the thing of, you know, the lady and. drinking her placenta in a live stream. And you're like, God. But then there's also this sort of other wellness world of people who are just kind of looking for answers. There's a woman who wrote a great book about her struggle with endometriosis. And she talks about being really annoyed when her doctor said, oh, are you into that alternative stuff? And she's like, I'm not. I'm attached to alternative medicine, but you've offered me no useful suggestions. So I am going to go looking and sort of create these communities in which we can inform each other about our symptoms and what helps us. And so she was like, I would love for that not to be alternative. I would love for that to be mainstream, but I can't get anywhere. So a lot of that is. Speaker 3 (13:56) built in, sort of baked into this other version of wellness, which is about underdiagnosed communities seeking care and support.