Cost of living Essays

Maloney artfully unpacks the fraught connection between money and health in her brilliant debut collection. She began working as an emergency room technician to pay off medical debt that piled up after a suicide attempt, and with subtle wit and moving vulnerability, she explores how survival is dependent on capital, offering a unique perspective on the American health-care system. In "A Brief Inventory of My Drugs and Their Retail Price," Maloney decries the cost of the medications prescribed to her for her mental health care: "Why was living so much easier for everyone else?" she laments. "Training Days, or On Experience" details the evangelizing EMT instructor who introduced Maloney to the harshness and patriarchy present in her field, while "Something for the Pain" amounts to a compassionate take on the relationship between chronic pain sufferers and big pharma. As she writes, "I am always suspect of people in pain. Or I was. Or I can be." 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. (Feb.)

Personal essays about the emotional and financial toll of the American health care system. Debut author Maloney is candid about her experiences as both a patient and caregiver. In the title essay, she writes about regretting her suicide attempt, but she's nearly as rueful about how her ignorance led her to seek treatment at a hospital that saddled her with an astronomical bill. Working as an emergency room technician, she's alert to how every pill, shot, and scan adds to a patient's burden. As a medical writer, she learned about pain management, a portion of the industry that pays her outsize fees in a discipline flooded with largesse despite OxyContin's devastating impact. Clearly many things are economically out of whack here. But much like other recent memoirists--Jia Tolentino (Trick Mirror) and Anna Wiener (Uncanny Valley) come to mind--Maloney comes at these injustices not with fury but with a flatness that almost seems determined to avoid feeling at all. This can be effective when Maloney lets the facts do the work, as in her chilling description of her planned overdose: "I normally took 900 milligrams; two pills at 450 milligrams each. So I took all of them instead." And it's clear that abuses by various systems have given her plenty of motivation to put on masks: "I am careful to regulate what I say, how I say it, who I am, who I appear to be." 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 about herself, pharmaceutical pricing, or our tendency to overmedicate. Nonetheless, Maloney's self-awareness is mostly engaging, and her resistance to big emotional gestures is understandable, particularly as a woman socialized "to say yes to everything….I am a string of yesses all the time, yes, yes, yes." Sharp personal essays light on lyricism but potently suffused with disillusionment. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.