Abandoned after 31% read.

This was really boring. The author didn't seem to have anything truly important to say. And she definitely didn't say anything in a captivating way.

The content of the essays overlapped, which made it repetitive. There were a few mild swear words.

But mostly, it was just boring. ( )

Wow these essays are honest and rough to read and infuriating and many more adjectives. The author has been on all sides of the health care system, and she gives us a rather unflinching look at all its horribleness. I can’t figure out if it’s more memoir than reporting or vice versa, but they both blend well while still holding back an incredible amount of information too (there’s nothing chronological here which made some essays hard for me to follow). ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )

Emily Maloney’s Cost of Living is a series of essays that, when taken as a whole, comprise an interesting memoir of the author’s intimate experience with America’s healthcare system. First as a patient, and then as a caregiver herself, Maloney offers a behind the scenes look that will be probably be disconcerting and scary to some readers while confirming the darkest fears of others who have had a little more experience with how the system works in this country.

For Emily Maloney, it all started when she tried to kill herself as a nineteen-year-old. Maloney’s attempt at taking her own life may have been unsuccessful, but it left her saddled with an enormous medical debt for treatment that she would struggle to pay off for years to come. The failed attempt also meant that Maloney would be seeing mental health doctors and taking a series of psychiatric drugs for years — treatments and drugs that sometimes seem to have done as much harm as good. Ironically enough, in order to pay off her past healthcare debts and to be able to continue affording her ongoing treatments, Maloney decided to work in the healthcare industry herself.

What she learned firsthand about billings and collections, hospitals, emergency rooms, medical staffs, and pharmaceutical companies is enough to make anyone uneasy about dealing with the system. Maloney’s essays do not paint a pretty picture. She speaks of patients and insurance companies being gouged by the purposeful uncharging of doctors and hospitals determined to maximize profits. She tells us about the burned out staffs so common to emergency rooms and the minimal level of care that most patients ever receive in them. She speaks to the indignities and dangers of being treated in a training hospital or emergency room. And using her own experiences with large pharmaceutical companies as background, she gives a thorough indictment of the waste and borderline illegal practices that make medicine so expensive to those who desperately need it for their survival.

Bottom Line: Cost of Living certainly offers a bleak look at the US healthcare system. While what Emily Maloney has to say about the system will not come as a surprise to most people who have had to deal with major health problems of their own or those of family members, it will serve as a warning to other more fortunate readers who have yet experienced it all for themselves. It will open some eyes. Despite her shaky start in life, the author has achieved much, and it would be interesting to hear her story in a more traditionally constructed memoir that focuses on how she did it.

Review Copy provided by Henry Holt & Company
Cost of Living to be published on February 8, 2022 ( )