A Globe and Mail best book of 2022

A wired best book of 2022

A Q BEST BOOK OF 2022

Read an excerpt in n+1

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

Wry, inventive, and relentlessly honest, a memoir of trying to make a living without compromising your truth.

Emma Healey just wants to be a writer, but that’s more a journey than a job, and the journey isn’t free. As a teenager, she begins her adventures in precarious 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 bedroom by 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 art even further. 

Through the stories of several very odd jobs, each related to—but also achingly far from—the job she really wants, poet and essayist Emma Healey creates a unique snapshot of the gig economy that is also a timeless meditation on identity, value, and language.