Emma Healey explores the void between art and the gig economy in her memoir Best Young Woman Job Book
Tabassum Siddiqui | | Posted: July 5, 2022 4:19 PM | Last Updated: July 5, 2022
'Something that has always saved me was knowing that I was first and foremost a writer.'
Emma Healey is a writer. Not the British novelist of the same name, mind you, but rather the Toronto-based author, essayist and poet — and someone who's used her skill with words in plenty of other jobs: from writing software manuals for an online pornography company, to finding just the right SEO keywords for a marketing firm run out of the owners' bedroom, to working the night shift close-captioning daytime TV.
Those, and several other day jobs Healey has had over the years, are chronicled in her new memoir, the cheekily titled Best Young Woman Job Book. A linked collection of essays which examine her long-held aim to be a writer through the lens of the jobs, relationships and other formative experiences that have shaped her as a person and as an artist, it's by turns frank and funny — and often both at the same time.
It also explores the dark underbelly of how young women can be preyed upon and taken advantage of — whether in literary circles or the average gig-economy job — an issue Healey has been underscoring for years through her writing.
Healey is also the author of two collections of poetry, 2012's Begin with the End in Mind, and Stereoblind, published in 2018.
Her essays and criticism have been featured in the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, National Post, Toronto Life, the Walrus, LA Review of Books, the FADER, Hazlitt, the Hairpin and more.
Healey spoke with CBC Books about taking her time to find the best way to tell her own story in Best Young Woman Job Book.
You started out studying creative writing intending to write fiction, and then your first two books were poetry collections — what made you want to take on a memoir?
All of my fiction had always been outside of the normal — I had a really hard time coming up with traditional plot and the sort of writing voice that I associated with fiction. So I gravitated towards poetry instead. I wasn't really a person who was naturally a poet as much as I was somebody who was just really interested in the possibilities of form. And so poetry was where I found my home.
Then I ended up writing personal essays through trying to examine what had happened to me in that creative writing program. I was wondering about why I hadn't ended up doing the thing that I had set out to do in the first place and examining the way we value certain genres over others.
That's kind of how I ended up at memoir — trying to parse out all these different experiences and work through my relationship with form and genre and all those things.
I always end up going down these alternate routes to arrive at the destination that I intended.
When I decided to be a fiction writer, it didn't quite work out the way I'd planned. And then when I decided I was going to be a poet, I ended up writing about my own personal experiences in a way that took my career in a different direction.
I always end up going down these alternate routes to arrive at the destination that I intended.
The book is a collection of interconnected essays, but also plays with structure — how did you arrive at what sort of form you wanted to use to tell your story?
I genuinely feel like this book is the closest thing I've ever written to the thing I was picturing in my mind — it feels really authentic to me. But it took me a really long time to arrive there — I think because I had a lot of preconceived notions about what a memoir was supposed to be like.
When I first pitched it, I was still working with this idea of it being a very traditional type of essay collection. But then the more I tried to work on that, the more dispirited I became, because it didn't sound like me — I was trying on this voice that felt insincere on the page. And it took a lot of chipping away, time working at deconstructing those ideas for myself about how I was supposed to tell my own story.
It took a lot of time working at deconstructing those ideas for myself about how I was supposed to tell my own story.
Part of the reason I had pitched this book in the first place was because I wanted to move up in my career and become a 'serious' writer and stop working my terrible closed-captioning job. So I had a lot of anxiety about moving away from those traditional structures.
I think what I ended up with is something that might be a bit harder to sell or publicize, but it's definitely something that feels better to me than if I had surrendered to the ideas about voice that I had placed in my mind early on.
How did you approach being so unflinchingly honest in your memoir, including sharing stories that involve other people?
Anyone that I included in the book that I loved and cared about and was concerned about what their opinion would be, I showed it to them far enough along in the process that I could give them an idea of what I wanted to include.
But it was scary to think about people out in the world reading it. And now everybody's read it — even my grandma! [laughs] And obviously, there is some stuff that she's not super stoked about. But I think that what I'm proud of is that when you read it, you can tell that everything that's in there is there for a reason.
In the content economy, it can be really easy to get pushed into sharing or disclosing things that you maybe don't actually want to. This book took me five years to write — and I'm kind of glad that it did, because it gave me lots of time to think about what I wanted to include.
What did you learn from working so many varied jobs over the years?
I still have a day job, so I'm not even speaking about this from a past perspective. I think something that has always saved me in the times that were hardest to get through was knowing that I was a writer first and foremost, and that was my real job.
There were times when I felt the most demeaned or sad or broke, where I was still paying attention and observing and noting down what was going on around me at my day job because I had a feeling all of it would become useful to me in some way that I didn't even necessarily understand at the time.
Something that has always saved me in the times that were hardest to get through was knowing that I was a writer first and foremost, and that was my real job.
The thing at the burning core of this book is that on one hand, there's a really [messed up] capitalist thing about using one's experiences as a way to make money and to make content. There is a part of your brain that starts to feel like it's problematic, but the flip side is — not to get corny — this almost spiritual feeling that no matter what else you're doing, there's a broader purpose.
There's a reason why you're experiencing all these things. And for me, that was writing the book.
While the book is ostensibly about work and jobs, it's also very much about power and gender dynamics — what did you want to explore about that issue?
I had written a few things about abuses of power and sexual assault, and the way that these things flourish in artistic communities. Processing my own relationships with those ideas through writing has been really crucial to me. But at the same time, I think I was starting to feel a bit hemmed in, because that was sort of the thing that people were asking me to write about over and over again.
So part of my desire with this book was that I wanted to explicitly steer very clear of all that stuff I felt I was being pigeonholed into — I didn't want to write about gender or abuse or harassment. I was going to stick to other topics and prove that I can do this other thing.
I think part of why the book took so long is that I tried writing that version of it for such a long time. And I kept feeling really stymied and frustrated, because the longer I worked on it, and the longer I thought about all these issues, I realized these things are inextricable from my experience.
That's part of the reason why I'm so grateful that I took a lot of time with this book, because it allowed me to process and come to terms with the fact that those things could be essential parts of my life and work and they don't have to completely define me — they're braided into the story, but they're not the whole story.
Emma Healey's comments have been edited for length and clarity.