Join us as we come together to celebrate this year's Storozynsky Residential Writing Fellowship - Emily Maloney.
Emily Maloney is the author of COST OF LIVING, an essay collection now out from Henry Holt, about her transformation from patient into EMT and in the pharmaceutical world, set against the backdrop of the failure of the American healthcare system. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Glamour, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Atlantic, the North American Review, and the American Journal of Nursing.
The evening will consist of a reading of Maloney's writing as well as a Q&A portion.
"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."