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Cost of Living: Essays
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About This Book
The searing intimacy of Girl, Interrupted combined 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.
Reviews
"It's easy to imagine that in the hands of another writer, Cost of Living would focus only on the author's health journey or their experience as an emergency room technician, but Maloney manages to show us much more ..."
"The book is sure to haunt your imagination the next time you enter the labyrinthine health care system and face the expenses, financial and otherwise."
"Readers will be eager to see where she goes next."
"'Cost of Living' — an indictment of the exorbitant costs of staying alive in America, and the weight of being hounded by a debt that reduces your life to dollars and cents — opens Maloney's debut essay collection of the same name."
"At times, the linguistic flatness reads as disengagement; it's unclear, for instance, what her accounting of the costs of various medications in one essay is meant to say ..."
"Maloney's nontraditional health care memoir serves as a warning for those who've never had to stay in the hospital stay, and sends the message that there is work to be done."
"This isn't just a thoughtful, compassionate book; it's also an essential one."
"They don't seem concerned about arriving at a grand unified theory of anything."
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