The world within Nathan Hill’s newest novel Wellness reflects and refracts parts of our own: the firehose of Facebook posts veering toward conspiracy; the research studies that offer insight into the development of adolescents or how to sleep better or how to eat; belief in the power of manifestation; articles that beg us to click with their claims that this one trick might save you from x, y, or z; the turmeric shots or crystals we might incorporate in the hopes of healing; and smartwatches that tell us, well, everything we might want to know about a body. Wellness pulls back the curtain on the illusion that anything we could possibly want is within reach, if only we tried the right supplement or study or routine.
Hill, who previously authored national bestseller The Nix, returns with another sweeping tale, one that follows the marriage of Elizabeth and Jack, who first meet because they live in apartments whose windows face one another. The image of them both separately looking through glass to peer in and imagine the other’s interior life captures many of the questions that this novel raises: How much can we really know about another person? What role do stories have in our perceptions of ourselves? Of love? Of the lives we build? How do we find happiness with ourselves, our bodies, and the ones we love when we are navigating life in a world telling us that things could always be better?
I had the opportunity to speak with Hill via Zoom about intuition versus information, the coldness of algorithms, and the ways our relationships can be shaped by the narratives we give them.
Jacqueline Alnes: Was there a defining moment that sparked the start of Wellness, or more just the collection of all these technologies and powders and tinctures that are sold to us?
Nathan Hill: It was that era, like 2014-ish when people started getting weird on Facebook, but we weren’t used to that yet. I had this creeping sensation that people were doing things and believing things and I was like, Where did this come from? My friends and I were all doing this stuff and now, looking back on it, I’m like, why was I tracking my macros? Why were we spiralizing zucchini instead of just making pasta? It started to feel like some people I knew, who were otherwise reasonable people, were living in completely different fact universes from me. We’re used to this feeling now, that we can’t decide on the same facts or the same reality.
JA: I am similarly obsessed with the 2010s. I was in college at the time and I was deep into apple cider vinegar and so many other diet “hacks.”
NH: It was this moment of optimism, I think. Look at all this new stuff we’re discovering! Look at all this information we now have! That optimism was leveraged by capitalism into clickbaity stuff that made us all constantly worried and afraid.
JA: I was laughing at “The System” watch that Jack wears, that measures literally almost everything you can about a human body. I wear a running watch and there’s this level where the information is too much. Like, did I sleep well? I can answer that myself when I wake up; I don’t need a watch to tell me. How much information do I need about my body when I’m living in it?
NH: Exactly. I feel like we’re all sort of coming out of it now, but for a while there we imbued those measurements with meaning. Technology is really good at counting your steps. But is that really all that meaningful? I also had an app on my phone, for a little while, that I would leave running in the night and it would listen to me tossing and turning and establish how much REM sleep I got. Eventually, I could find no pattern between what the app was telling me and how I felt in the morning, and sometimes it was weird because I’d wake up feeling great and the app was like, you slept like shit last night. And then my mood would plummet. It was paradoxically controlling my mood.
JA: Information is obviously so valuable. Elizabeth reviews a slew of studies in an attempt to understand her toddler. But there’s this line between information and intuition. From writing this novel, did you come to a conclusion about what that balance might look like for people?
NH: The issue of misinformation and disinformation is very well established. I think we can be misled by true things as much as we can be misled by false things if the true things are coming at us like a firehose of information and we don’t have time or perspective to contextualize them or apply any kind of wisdom to them.
All of my friends had babies about exactly the same time, so I was watching them go through this. They are very thoughtful people whose parenthood they wanted to be informed by the best practices. But there are so many best practices that they started thinking they were bad parents. I’m watching them be amazing parents and they felt they were failing every day. You can never live up to all this information.
We live in a media ecosystem where, because these stories get clicks, we keep seeing these stories about some study, somewhere, with thirty participants where they learn something about a molecule. Suddenly, there’s a new health fad. That’s not how it’s supposed to work. It’s supposed to be very incremental. We’re not supposed to make big, rash decisions based on small sample sizes. There needs to be a reevaluation of health science communication and maybe, also, from a consumer’s point of view, taking everything with a grain of salt. If there’s a study that says, “We all need to do turmeric shots,” maybe look at the methodology.
JA: Something I felt while reading the book was that Elizabeth is a reasonable person, doing research that is well-founded. On the other side, you have Brandie, who I loved, who is just manifesting her life, but to a delusional point where she’s unable to see the reality of her life. I usually think of these types of people as polar opposites, but the book allowed me to see that they are connected in that they are all people reaching for answers, and both methods can become harmful, in a way.
Sometimes the stories impact you more than the turmeric or the juice cleanse.
NH: It struck me that any idea, even a good idea, when believed in too rigidly, too ideologically, too inflexibly, can turn into error. Brandie’s original thought, which is if you have confidence and intentionality about your life, then good things are more likely to happen, seems reasonable. But when you believe that so hard that you begin to think your good thoughts are sending good vibrations into the universe, or I’m actually changing the universe with my thoughts, then you might start to believe anyone who’s down on their luck it must be their fault –– they must be low-vibration people. I’ve heard of people who believe in the manifestation stuff thinking, Why would I get insurance? That’s me thinking bad things that might happen. She’s believing in it way too hard, and it’s curdling into error.
Elizabeth, too, is trying to make her parenthood informed by all the best scientific practices, but if you do that too much, it drives you crazy. There’s a line late in the book where Elizabeth’s mentor says something like, believe what you’re going to believe, but believe with curiosity, believe with humility. I think if there’s a moral of the story it’s probably that.
JA: You did so much research for this book. I know this is not going to cover even a slice of it, but what did you learn about social media, conspiracy theories, and misinformation that interested you?
NH: I read hundreds of pages of Facebook patent applications. Facebook is very hush-hush about the algorithm but they’re all patented and in that you have to describe what the algorithm does. That’s all public information. What struck me is how the algorithms are literally speaking a different language. That sounds obvious, but they’re taking us, the human person, and abstracting us into various mathematical values and then establishing relationships between other mathematical abstractions. And that’s all we are.
What was surprising to me was understanding that we are a node in a system, and all the algorithm really cares about are these relationships to other nodes, and whether those connections are brittle or robust. The robust connections then implies that they might be interested in the connections that those nodes are connected to. In none of this incredibly brilliant genius-level math is anyone thinking, Are they having a good time? Is this good for them? Are they happy doing this?
I was struck, in 2017-2018 by how many friends I had to ignore or unfriend on Facebook, how many people were going down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theory. I would message them and say, Hey, I don’t think this is right, and talk it out with them, and Facebook would keep showing me more of that content. I realized that I was losing this certain friend because I was fighting all the time, and Facebook would show me something he had posted three weeks ago that I had missed like, hey, do you want to fight about this now? It didn’t care whether I was fighting; it cared that I was engaging. It’s coldly, unemotionally mathematical. It cares about engagement and it does not care whether it makes you happy or not. It should have been obvious, but it was most surprising as I was doing the research.
JA: I feel like as a user of social media I so often tell myself it’s a platform where I can tell my story, like it feels personal and human. You get that in the book, too, with Brandie telling a version of her marriage on Instagram and then you get the reality which is sad. It’s interesting to think about the disparity between what social media might be and the algorithm that it really is.
NH: I do not disbelieve people who say that they find some of the social media platforms valuable to them. If they’ve been able to carve out community in these places that feels intimate and good to them, that’s fantastic. I think you’re running uphill if you try to do that, but I do think it’s possible. My sense of it, and my experience with it, is that anything that goes on the platform just feels like “the platform.” When I post something on Facebook, it starts to feel like an ad rather than a sincere thing that I’m saying. There’s some kind of alchemy that happens whenever you post on social media, it’s a little separated from you, it’s a performance of you—almost necessarily. I think there’s a kind of Marshall McLuhan “the medium is the message” kind of quality to social media and the way we use it.
We don’t live in a world that offers a whole lot of care. But when you go to a spa, they’re listening to you. They are filling a gap, and sometimes grifters are coming in to fill that gap.
I think I understood a long time ago that Twitter was just bad for me. There was this joke account, Cormac McCarthy as if he were on Twitter, and it was funny only because you would never put this stuff on Twitter. I’m reading these tweets thinking, this is what I want to be reading, and if this is antagonistic to the platform’s ethos, then why am I on Twitter?
JA: There’s such a powerful thread of storytelling throughout this novel, and how time can shape memory, like you meet someone ten years ago and you have this story of your meeting and years later it’s not what you kept it as in your mind. How do we tell ourselves true stories when there is so much influencing our perceptions? When the power of story erodes, who are you? Are you the story you tell yourself?
NH: There’s this old thought experiment that I love and I was thinking about a lot when I was writing the book. It’s the Ship of Theseus. I think it was first told by Plutarch in one of his histories. The story is that the hero, Theseus, returns to Athens, and every year thereafter, the Athenians take his famous ship for a sail. Over time, the ship needs to be repaired—an oar here, a plank there—and after two centuries of this, every bit of the Ship of Theseus has been replaced. The question is: Is this still the Ship of Theseus? Is this still the same ship even though everything that’s made the ship has been replaced?
I was thinking about friends of mine who were going to Phish concerts in their hippie garb who are now corporate lawyers. I was thinking about friends of mine who were completely straight-edge, didn’t touch a drop of chemicals in high school who are now LSD shamans. People can really, radically change. The thing about having a storytelling brain is that we will tell ourselves a story about why it makes sense, no matter what happens. I think we are really capable of fooling ourselves with that story.
JA: Speaking of marriage, because of this book, I asked my husband this morning, Do you think that love is a story we tell ourselves or is it real? And he was like, What are you doing? To think about how much you built on your first time meeting someone or how much you’ve evolved, and to have two people telling stories at the same time, hoping they stay linked, it’s wild. Through writing Elizabeth and Jack’s story, did you learn anything about love or relationships that stood out to you?
NH: By the way, did your husband have an answer?
JA: He said love is real, so we’re in it for another year.
NH: Good answer. My wife and I have a great origin story. We had been flirting over email for a very long time and then finally she was like, I’m coming to visit you. I was driving to the airport to pick her up and got into a car accident on the way. It was a really rainy night and I spun out and hit another car. It was before cellphones so I had no way to reach her; she was waiting at the airport, thought she had been stood up, and on the side of the road I got talking to the guy whose car I had hit for a very long time and I was telling him how she was coming to see me. The tow truck took my car away and I convinced this guy to bring me to the airport as proof. We have told that story so many times that I’ve heard people telling it for us, just because they’ve heard it so many times. We have completely mythologized ourselves, chapter and verse, people can repeat it.
But your question was about love. There’s this interesting research out there that talks about how emotions are simply the names we give to certain bodily sensations. Somewhere along the way, when we feel a certain way, we learn to call that anger, or we learn to call that hunger. I think if you think that love is that fluttery feeling you get inside at that first high romantic moment, then that might be disappointing ten years later when that fluttery feeling is a little more rare. But it’s replaced by something else and that feeling is not necessarily something inside of you. If people think of it as something that happens within themselves, it can curdle into something selfish, but if you think of it more as a practice, as a thing that’s mutually built and given, you can get that feeling back but it’s given instead of taken. That’s not anything new. bell hooks defines it that way in All About Love, Dan Savage has something very similar with his campground rule that in any relationship you leave it better than you found it. This all implies action.
JA: It brings me back to thinking about wellness. Sometimes we think of it as the sparkly turmeric shot you think is going to heal you at the grocery store or the really expensive chlorophyll stuff that you can sprinkle on stuff and you’re like, wow, I did my job today. In reality, it’s deeper than that; it’s more of a practice. It’s rooted in how we feel about our bodies and how we’ve been conditioned to feel about illness.
There’s some alchemy that happens whenever you post on social media, it’s a little separated from you, it’s a performance of you—almost necessarily.
NH: We live in a culture where you’re one nice, forever home away from happiness or one chlorophyll whatever away from never needing to go to the doctor again. I understand it. The last time I went to the doctor, I filled out stuff in triplicate even though I’d already filled everything out online and was seen an hour past my appointment time and saw the doctor for eight minutes and she couldn’t remember what she told me last time and then I got charged $200 and had to fight my insurance company to pay for it. That’s just a normal experience, you know? If there’s an influencer who’s saying if you take chlorophyll you’ll never need to see the doctor again, that’s tempting. I understand the impulse. We don’t live in a world that offers a whole lot of care; we don’t feel listened to. But when you go to a spa, they’re listening to you. They are filling a gap, and sometimes grifters are coming in to fill that gap.
JA: What do you hope readers take away from reading Wellness?
NH: I was having a fight with a friend once, he was doing a turmeric smoothie cleanse and doing crystal therapy and I was like, dude, none of this is real. And he was like, What does it matter if it’s not real if I feel better? That question haunted me. It’s not a secret that a lot of wellness stuff doesn’t perform a lot better than placebo, but it turns out that placebo can be sometimes pretty effective. Sometimes we are medicating ourselves with stories, with belief. What I’ve started really thinking about, as a result of this book, is the stories that are entering my brain. Sometimes you should pay more attention to the stories entering your brain than the chemicals entering your body. Sometimes the stories impact you more than the turmeric or the juice cleanse.