Best Young Woman Job Book
Emma Healey
Random House Canada, 2022
Review by Kristina Rothstein
On first perusal, Emma Healey’s Best Young Woman Job Book might seem like a slightly unconventional memoir. It could be read as a young writer’s life story, poetically relayed through the work she has done to support herself. It might be considered audacious to write such a memoir when barely out of your twenties. And it might be eccentric to structure your life history around all the crazy jobs you’ve had. Some readers might be surprised by the succinct quality of the prose, though Healey first achieved notice for her poetry. All those reactions are valid, but they are also red herrings and beside the point. At its core, Best Young Woman Job Book is a scathing takedown of male power structures, specifically those at work in literary scenes and creative writing departments. 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.
Healey really has had a lot of weird jobs. Ordering her memoir around the activity of work is an effective device. Work is what takes up most of our time as adults, so, in a way, she is recording where her time and energy have been spent. The focus on work also draws attention to her literary aspirations, and the work she might do if she could afford to just be writing. Even when grants and awards give her time and space to write, she finds it nearly impossible to escape from the prevailing cultural belief that thinking and synthesizing and writing are somehow not real labour. Despite the pressure, Healey tells herself that writing is work. She is brutally honest about the difficulty of having and executing ideas. She knows there’s something she wants to say, but that it is often unreachable. Her writing journey is complicated by a lesson she learns from her various jobs.
Some of Healey’s day jobs include writing web content for a search engine optimization company (the title is a nod to SEO), doing almost nothing at a web pornography company, working reception at a massage therapy clinic, writing biographies at a speaker’s agency, and writing closed captions for TV shows. The book is mostly chronological, so we get Healey’s story of each of these jobs (usually without the benefit of hindsight, which would have spurred her to quit sooner). But again, the funny, ridiculous stories are not what is important. Instead, we start to wonder why these pointless tasks have meaning or profit ascribed to them at all. Healey’s experiences convey the meaninglessness and randomness of life.
Through the uncertainty and heartache of trying to both be a writer and make a living, Healey does get a lot of encouragement: publishing a book of poems, receiving offers from publishers, snagging a newspaper book review job, and getting a writer’s grant to go to the Banff Centre for the Arts (not called Banff, but rather “the country’s most prestigious arts centre”). This success comes despite layers of trauma experienced as a young, female artist. At university, she is one of the young women who are flattered to be invited out to bars by the “real writers” who teach them. “They laugh, too, when we leave the bar with them. They laugh like someone has handed them a briefcase full of millions of dollars in unmarked bills.” She ends up in a toxic relationship with her professor, who is decades older than her, that lasts way too long. She describes multiple experiences of unwanted sex, encounters that hurt but left few physical traces. She almost convinces herself that they have left no psychological traces, until she realizes that she has let herself become numb, that she blacked out whole periods of her life.
Several years later, she is out with her younger classmates. “At some point everyone’s talking about bad relationships and I mention a shitty boyfriend I once had. There was a bit of an age gap, I say, on my way to something else, not really thinking. Everyone in the group looks at each other, then at me. The gesture is so perfectly synchronized I must be imagining it. We know, someone says, meaning everyone does.” In 2014, Healey wrote about her experiences for the influential online publication, The Hairpin, and the response was an avalanche of other women sharing similar stories, finally feeling seen and heard, making her a proto-Me Too feminist celebrity. After years of doubting her memories, doubting her sanity, Healey began to reshape herself as a person with a powerful voice.
Best Young Woman Job Book is written in a rhythm that is propulsive, addictive, and concise. The style seems simple but it has obviously been honed to allow the writing to flow effortlessly. One of the main features is a lack of specifics. Most of the people are given a description rather than a name, and even places like a city are not named, rather positioned relative to other cities or notable features such as a prison. Tinder is referenced as “an app that turns dating into a game.” Companies and professors and writers appear as settings and characters, never named, and it is entertaining to uncover the mystery of who is who, recognizing little details here and there, as Healey writes around them. Healey often writes around the big truths of her story (the lack of specifics perhaps protecting her from pain and lawsuits), making this tangential approach both stylistic and thematic.
Many writers would have adapted this material into a fictionalized novel. Healey had the courage to embrace this as a true story, a memoir. It’s brave and unflinching, an awkward story of making mistakes but wondering why it is still acceptable for men to take advantage of women and call it female liberation. When Healey returns to the Banff Centre, this time on her own dime, she tells her peers, “I’m there to write a book about work. Not about trauma, or pain, or fear, or memory, or trauma, or sexual assault. … A book about power and language and value, written on my own terms, without reference to anything that makes me uncomfortable or unsettled or unsure of myself. A book that will amplify the things I want to talk about and quietly make the rest disappear.” And she did write a book about work. But, more importantly, she wrote about trauma and memory and fear in a book that is uncomfortable and unsettling and brilliant. She did not let the rest quietly disappear, but let it seep in through all the cracks and edges of her writing until it permeated everything, finally allowing herself to believe in her own life story.
Kristina Rothstein is a writer, editor, and cultural critic in Vancouver, BC.