The Ways We Make a Living

When they write, authors can choose to imagine fantastical worlds, or to follow the lives of celebrities or presidents. Describing the banality of the day-to-day—our relationships, the spaces we inhabit, and our jobs—can seem less glamorous and more difficult. But there’s plenty of fascinating territory to explore in writing about the workplace—including the blurry line, especially in modern times, between our personal lives and our professional ones.

In fiction, some authors find inventive ways to highlight the alienation frequently found in the contemporary and Hiroko Oyamada’s describe , oneon a spacecraft, one in a futuristic factory. In spite of these advanced-seeming settings, their employees still feel isolated and detached from their work. Overidentifying with ourwork may not be the solution either. Job security can be uncertain, and even losing a position we don’t love can be destabilizing, like in Imogen Binnie’s ; the protagonist, the ” Maria Griffiths, makes a fateful, disastrous trip west after being fired from her bookselling gig.But people can find joy in what they do, even if it appears mind-numbing—like the narrator in Kikuko Tsumura’s , who changes her relationship to employment by taking a series of temporary but necessary positions.