A book cover showing the shape of a woman’s curly head of hair abstracted into overlapping shapes in pink, blue and green. The cover says “Best Young Woman Job Book: A Memoir / Emma Healey"
SElected praise:
“Who suspected a Canadian poet would write the best account of life in the gig economy? Emma Healey’s funny, rueful memoir documents her peripatetic employment history, including stints at an SEO farm operated out of a middle-aged man’s bedroom and a remarkably unsexy time technical writing at one of the world’s largest porn companies. Healey’s forthright treatment of the central role money plays in a creative life is enormously refreshing. Instead of hand-waving the financial details that have made her career possible, she molds into her art the work she had to do in order to do the work she wanted. It’s a neat trick. Best Young Woman Job Book has only been released in Canada thus far; here’s hoping it finds the wider audience it deserves.”
- Kate Knibbs, Wired Magazine“I have not read a better distillation of navigating creative life in the post-financial-crisis world than Emma Healey’s Best Young Woman Job Book. Healey reckons with the ways capitalism has distorted the very markets it’s supposed to make more efficient in ways that also make it increasingly difficult to live out a fulfilling career. It’s a truly Millennial tale – self-aware and clever enough to make you forget the depressing circumstances that shaped it.”
- Josh O’Kane, author of Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy
“Emma Healey is working through the tension between the joys of writing for a living and the reality of navigating the gig economy and the world of publishing. But she’s doing it with flair and style and an incredibly infuriating amount of skill. This is the kind of book where you’ll finish a stretch and pause and think wait, how did she do that, and go back and try to piece it together for yourself.”
- Elamin Abdelmahmoud, author of Son of Elsewhere“Propulsive, addictive and concise. At its core, Best Young Woman Job Book is a scathing takedown of male power structures. The whole story is shaped by the dark abuses of power by men over women, by male literary types over aspiring young female writers. It’s furious, self-deprecating, and often hilarious.”
- PRISM International“To the right reader, reading Healey is like watching basketball or whatever sport: a measured display of joy, technique, and precision that will send you out to try the moves for yourself, oblivious to or in spite of the fact that a career in sports is a statistical impossibility.”
- The Bookshelf