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    Cost of Living: Essays
    Cost of Living: Essays
    Cost of Living: Essays
    Ebook224 pages3 hours

    Cost of Living: Essays

    By Emily Maloney

    3/5

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    About this ebook

    A Best Book of 2022 - USA TODAY
    Named one of the Chicago Public Library's "Best Books of 2022"

    “Astute, compassionate and lethally funny. Maloney is an exceptionally alert writer on whom nothing is lost, who sees everything with excruciating clarity.” —Sarah Manguso, The New York Times

    The searing intimacy of Girl, Interrupted combines with the uncomfortable truths of The Empathy Exams in a collection of essays chronicling one woman’s experiences as both patient and caregiver, giving a unique perspective from both sides of the hospital bed.

    What does it cost to live?

    When we fall ill, our lives are itemized on a spreadsheet. A thousand dollars for a broken leg, a few hundred for a nasty cut while cooking dinner. Then there are the greater costs for even greater misfortunes. The car accidents, breast cancers, blood diseases, and dark depressions.

    When Emily Maloney was nineteen she tried to kill herself. An act that would not only cost a great deal personally, but also financially, sending her down a dark spiral of misdiagnoses, years spent in and out of hospitals and doctor’s offices, and tens of thousands owed in medical debt. To work to pay off this crippling burden, Emily becomes an emergency room technician. Doing the grunt work in a hospital, and taking care of patients at their most vulnerable moments, chronicling these interactions in searingly beautiful, surprising ways.

    Shocking and often slyly humorous, Cost of Living is a brilliant examination of just what exactly our troubled healthcare system asks us to pay, as well as a look at what goes on behind the scenes at our hospitals and in the minds of caregivers.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateFeb 8, 2022
    ISBN9781250213310
    Author

    Emily Maloney

    Emily Maloney’s work has appeared in Glamour, Virginia Quarterly Review, Best American Essays, and the American Journal of Nursing, among others. She has worked as a dog groomer, pastry chef, general contractor, tile setter, and catalog model and has sold her ceramics at art fairs. Maloney has twice been awarded a MacDowell Fellowship. She lives in Evanston, Illinois. Her books include Burn This House Down and Cost of Living.

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    Reviews for Cost of Living

    3/5

    15 ratings4 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Wow these essays are honest and rough to read and infuriating and many more adjectives. The author has been on all sides of the health care system, and she gives us a rather unflinching look at all its horribleness. I can’t figure out if it’s more memoir than reporting or vice versa, but they both blend well while still holding back an incredible amount of information too (there’s nothing chronological here which made some essays hard for me to follow).
    • 3/5
      Emily Mahoney’s memoir in essays, Cost of Living, is yet another book that starts out strong but sputters as it goes on. The title essay, which concerns the author’s reckoning with mental illness and related medical debt, is the collection's best. The rest feel like filler. For example, there is a non-insightful tally of her psychoactive drug prescription history. There's also a lot of minutiae about the author's various medicine-adjacent jobs. None of this material works well enough to sustain an entire book.
    • 4/5
      Emily Maloney’s Cost of Living is a series of essays that, when taken as a whole, comprise an interesting memoir of the author’s intimate experience with America’s healthcare system. First as a patient, and then as a caregiver herself, Maloney offers a behind the scenes look that will be probably be disconcerting and scary to some readers while confirming the darkest fears of others who have had a little more experience with how the system works in this country.For Emily Maloney, it all started when she tried to kill herself as a nineteen-year-old. Maloney’s attempt at taking her own life may have been unsuccessful, but it left her saddled with an enormous medical debt for treatment that she would struggle to pay off for years to come. The failed attempt also meant that Maloney would be seeing mental health doctors and taking a series of psychiatric drugs for years — treatments and drugs that sometimes seem to have done as much harm as good. Ironically enough, in order to pay off her past healthcare debts and to be able to continue affording her ongoing treatments, Maloney decided to work in the healthcare industry herself.What she learned firsthand about billings and collections, hospitals, emergency rooms, medical staffs, and pharmaceutical companies is enough to make anyone uneasy about dealing with the system. Maloney’s essays do not paint a pretty picture. She speaks of patients and insurance companies being gouged by the purposeful uncharging of doctors and hospitals determined to maximize profits. She tells us about the burned out staffs so common to emergency rooms and the minimal level of care that most patients ever receive in them. She speaks to the indignities and dangers of being treated in a training hospital or emergency room. And using her own experiences with large pharmaceutical companies as background, she gives a thorough indictment of the waste and borderline illegal practices that make medicine so expensive to those who desperately need it for their survival. Bottom Line: Cost of Living certainly offers a bleak look at the US healthcare system. While what Emily Maloney has to say about the system will not come as a surprise to most people who have had to deal with major health problems of their own or those of family members, it will serve as a warning to other more fortunate readers who have yet experienced it all for themselves. It will open some eyes. Despite her shaky start in life, the author has achieved much, and it would be interesting to hear her story in a more traditionally constructed memoir that focuses on how she did it. Review Copy provided by Henry Holt & CompanyCost of Living to be published on February 8, 2022
    • 4/5
      Cost of Living by Emily Maloney is a collection of essays that are at times disheartening and at other times humorous, but they all come together to paint a bleak picture of what passes for a healthcare system in the United States.I was probably expecting more about Maloney's personal struggles but was pleasantly surprised to find that those serve as more of a frame for looking at the economics of the healthcare system. One thing I took away was the stark contrast between healthcare providers' interest in making as much money as possible, their economy so to speak, and the patients, through Maloney's own experience as well as others, financial burdens and mental anguish that presents, their mental and fiscal economies.I tend to see and understand things from a dark perspective when assessing US healthcare but that is on me and not this book. The essays touch on and illustrate many behind the scenes encounters that certainly can be read as criticism, but Maloney keeps a relatively light and engaging tone so the reader does not go down a dark rabbit hole (unless you're like me and are already halfway down the rabbit hole).I would recommend this to readers who like firsthand accounts of both patients and healthcare workers. This is an entertaining read and Maloney makes her points subtly and with some compassion for all involved.Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.

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    Cost of Living - Emily Maloney

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