Overview

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.

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9781250213297

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Reviews

I've never read anything like Emily Maloney's Cost of Living, a devastatingly precise, thoughtful accounting of what it costs to stay alive in capitalist America. In essays rife with vivid characters in unforgettable scenes and stitched through with vulnerability, Maloney offers a clear-eyed assessment of our disastrous medical system. From the years-long medical debt of surviving a suicide attempt to the deadly fate facing untreated pain patients, Maloney's writing indicts the system while honoring the humanity of those caught in it. Everyone with a mortal body should read this book. I hope it creates change. --Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, author of The Fact of a Body Emily Maloney's Cost of Living is a brilliant book, a staggering indictment of a brutal and arbitrary healthcare system that shapes our days in ways so small it often goes right over our heads. On top of that, it's gorgeously written--clear, exacting, rigorous, compassionate--in sentences that lift off the page like song. --Paul Lisicky, author of Later: My Life at the Edge of the World Emily Maloney writes from a vantage point completely unlike any other and takes us on a tour, both fascinating and harrowing, of the various costs of the healthcare system: financial, physical, emotional, spiritual. Cost of Living is a desperately needed book that offers the reader an entirely new understanding of what it means to be sick and what it means to be healed. I love this book. --Kerry Egan, author of On Living

I've never read anything like Emily Maloney's Cost of Living, a devastatingly precise, thoughtful accounting of what it costs to stay alive in capitalist America. In essays rife with vivid characters in unforgettable scenes and stitched through with vulnerability, Maloney offers a clear-eyed assessment of our disastrous medical system. From the years-long medical debt of surviving a suicide attempt to the deadly fate facing untreated pain patients, Maloney's writing indicts the system while honoring the humanity of those caught in it. Everyone with a mortal body should read this book. I hope it creates change. --Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, author of The Fact of a Body A disturbing book - an indictment of a healthcare system that burdens the already-burdened with bills they can't pay - but also, such an exhilarating read: lucid, mordant, and awake, awake, awake. --Joan Wickersham, author of The Suicide Index and The News from Spain Emily Maloney's Cost of Living is a brilliant book, a staggering indictment of a brutal and arbitrary healthcare system that shapes our days in ways so small it often goes right over our heads. On top of that, it's gorgeously written--clear, exacting, rigorous, compassionate--in sentences that lift off the page like song. --Paul Lisicky, author of Later: My Life at the Edge of the World Emily Maloney writes from a vantage point completely unlike any other and takes us on a tour, both fascinating and harrowing, of the various costs of the healthcare system: financial, physical, emotional, spiritual. Cost of Living is a desperately needed book that offers the reader an entirely new understanding of what it means to be sick and what it means to be healed. I love this book. --Kerry Egan, author of On Living In Cost of Living, Emily Maloney explores from many perspectives, and with deep empathy, intelligence, and humor the real suffering caused by medical debt and the underpayment of healthcare workers. Like Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed and Atul Gawande's Complications, Maloney's memoir is at once illuminating and alarming. It will leave readers asking: why has no one ever written a book like this before? --Dr. Suzanne Koven, MD, author of Letter to a Young Female Physician

Maloney artfully unpacks the fraught connection between money and health in her brilliant debut collection. Maloney is masterful at beginning in a place of skepticism and ending with empathy, all while weaving in her own fascinating story. Readers will be eager to see where she goes next. --Publishers Weekly, starred review I've never read anything like Emily Maloney's Cost of Living, a devastatingly precise, thoughtful accounting of what it costs to stay alive in capitalist America. In essays rife with vivid characters in unforgettable scenes and stitched through with vulnerability, Maloney offers a clear-eyed assessment of our disastrous medical system. From the years-long medical debt of surviving a suicide attempt to the deadly fate facing untreated pain patients, Maloney's writing indicts the system while honoring the humanity of those caught in it. Everyone with a mortal body should read this book. I hope it creates change. --Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, author of The Fact of a Body Emily Maloney has written a luminous book on one of the greatest shames in American society: our avaricious healthcare system. In essays which humanize the subject through incredibly rich character detail, Maloney has offered a beating heart to every reader who feels. What we do with that heart is up to us. I hope everyone reads this. --Garrard Conley, New York Times bestselling author of Boy Erased A disturbing book - an indictment of a healthcare system that burdens the already-burdened with bills they can't pay - but also, such an exhilarating read: lucid, mordant, and awake, awake, awake. --Joan Wickersham, author of The Suicide Index and The News from Spain Emily Maloney's Cost of Living is a brilliant book, a staggering indictment of a brutal and arbitrary healthcare system that shapes our days in ways so small it often goes right over our heads. On top of that, it's gorgeously written--clear, exacting, rigorous, compassionate--in sentences that lift off the page like song. --Paul Lisicky, author of Later: My Life at the Edge of the World Emily Maloney writes from a vantage point completely unlike any other and takes us on a tour, both fascinating and harrowing, of the various costs of the healthcare system: financial, physical, emotional, spiritual. Cost of Living is a desperately needed book that offers the reader an entirely new understanding of what it means to be sick and what it means to be healed. I love this book. --Kerry Egan, author of On Living In Cost of Living, Emily Maloney explores from many perspectives, and with deep empathy, intelligence, and humor the real suffering caused by medical debt and the underpayment of healthcare workers. Like Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed and Atul Gawande's Complications, Maloney's memoir is at once illuminating and alarming. It will leave readers asking: why has no one ever written a book like this before? --Suzanne Koven, MD, author of Letter to a Young Female Physician Emily Maloney's deeply affecting and astute collection of essays are offered to the reader as a kind of gift to be savored. There is such melancholic richness throughout; each one must be unwrapped slowly and contemplated gently. Within each essay is a steady stream of rational sense-making and introspection, gracefully intertwined with all that is utterly incomprehensible about the medical industry, mental illness and life itself. --Rana Awdish, MD, author of In Shock

Author Information

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.

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