Best Young Woman Job Book

Emma Healey just wants to be awriter, but that's more a journey thana job, and the journey isn't free. As ateenager, she begins her adventures inprecarious employment when introduced by her actor/playwright mother to the role of "standardized patient," performing illness as a living training dummy for medical students.

In university, she joins a creative writing program, cultivating a poet's interest in language while learning lessons about the literary world that have more to do with survival than art. Through her twenties, she writes software manuals for the world's leading producer of online pornography, masters search engine optimization for a marketing firm run out of a bedroomby two Phish-loving brothers, narrowly escapes death as a research assistant for a television drama, and works the night shift captioning daytime TV.

Along the way, as she navigates dating apps, tumultuous relationships, and the evolution of a voice that she is slowly learning to trust, she begins writing personal essays for money and finds herself embroiled in a content economy that blurs the boundaries between day job and making arteven further.

Through the stories of several very odd jobs, each related to but also achingly far from thejob she really wants, poet and essayist Emma Healey creates a unique snapshot of the gigeconomy that is also a timeless meditation on identity, value, and language. (From Random House Canada)

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