★ Larocca (coauthor of New York Look Book) has done it all—and lived to save wellness-focused women everywhere money, time, and sanity by sharing her story alongside science-backed and well-documented alternatives to the pipeline of cleanses, detoxes, magic pills, retreats, and procedures that ultimately fail them. Divided into chapters centered on promises of magical cures, glow-getting beauty secrets, spiritual and soul-seeking practices, and cleanses, the book explores how wellness is an ideal against which women measure themselves, which in turn becomes a solipsistic process (i.e., wellness for its own sake). Larocca delves deep into Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop empire and how it has trickled down into Walmart’s wellness days and Dunkin’ Donuts’ avocado toast—meaning that aspirational bodies and the price tags they come with are everywhere and indicate that, as this book demonstrates, there’s always a better version of you for sale.... At once an exposé of beauty and wellness trends, a critique of patriarchal culture, and a guide for individuals seeking real wellness not by purchasing things but by developing inner resources and making sustainable choices, this is the detox many people need from, well, detoxes and their often-detrimental effects.
—Library Journal (starred review)
★ "The present-day vogue for wellness is merely the latest attempt to convince women to buy products to correct for imagined deficiencies, according to this trenchant debut critique. Fashion reporter Larocca suggests that beauty product manufacturers responded to the rise of body positivity in the 2000s by promoting the concept of “glow,” rather than thinness, as the central marker of beauty, creating the illusion of inclusivity while insisting that looking good requires topical ointments and body brushes. Surveying the dubious science behind many wellness practices, she recounts getting a colonic (an enema “on steroids”) from a doctor who claimed that foods with opposite ionic charges “pile up... like sludge” inside the body without clinical intervention. Larocca also covers the more harmful aspects of the wellness space, positing that such trends as intermittent fasting and elimination diets promote disordered eating by implicitly equating skinniness with health. The nuanced analysis notes that while wellness culture’s appeal stems in part from legitimate concerns about the pharmaceutical industry’s insidious influence on mainstream medicine, the supplements hawked by alternative medicine practitioners are usually subject to the same corrupting profit motives. Penetrating and thought-provoking, this will cause readers to think twice before reaching for the latest purported cure-all.
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“What does it mean to be a “well” woman? And how has wellness become such a mammoth industry, with an alarming amount of space for the kooks and the quacks? Fashion journalist Larocca surveys the vast array of products and treatments traditional and new, reliable and questionable. She notes the assumption that the well woman is slender, though not all slimness is created equal. Weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy offer a “chemical thinness” that lacks “glow” and “morality,” Larocca observes. As for wellness fashion, there's Lululemon, founded in 1998 by a Canadian American Ayn Rand fanatic who took up yoga because of back pain. This brand popularized high-end trendy athleisure clothes favored by the stylish well woman who does juice cleanses and avoids gluten (only one percent of the U.S. population actually has a gluten allergy). Larocca offers interesting portraits of famous people like Goop founder Gwyneth Paltrow (a wellness “she-god”) and regular people like herself, admitting the “embarrassing truth” that her socioeconomic status is most relevant to her health. Readers will find lots of informative and entertaining food (or juice) for thought.”
— Booklist
“A magical synthesis of crackerjack reporting, incisive cultural commentary, and, most importantly, elegant, self-reflective memoir, How to Be Well perfectly captures the defining ethos of our day. I've been a fan of Amy Larocca for two decades and this book, to me, felt like a gift: An opportunity to spend a few days inside her head, as she works out the manifold contradictions and confusions at the heart of contemporary womanhood.”
—Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year
“Amy Larocca brings her buoyant wit, cultural fluency, and indispensable skepticism to this rollicking exploration of our desperation for wellness, our devotion to CBD, self-care, and
Soul Cycle, deftly separating the gobbledygook from the truly transformative.”
—Ariel Levy, author of The Rules Do Not Apply
