Emily Maloney

Emily Mahoney’s memoir in essays, Cost of Living, is yet another book that starts out strong but sputters as it goes on. The title essay, which concerns the author’s reckoning with mental illness and related medical debt, is the collection's best. The rest of the essays feel like filler. For example, there is a non-insightful tally of her psychoactive drug prescription history. There's also a lot of minutiae about the author's various medicine-adjacent jobs. None of this material works well enough to sustain an entire book.… (more)

this is a collection interesting and well written essays that ended up being about different aspects of health care, as she talked about her own mental health issues, being a patient in a psych ward, her medical debt, working in an er, studying to be an emt, working for a pharmaceutical company, and more.

as collections can be, some of the essays were stronger and held my interest far more than others (as it went on i found myself sometimes less interested) but overall these are well done and interesting. i was hoping to find more about medical debt and mental health in general, but still, she covered a lot of territory here and did it pretty well.… (more)