Emma Healey - Best Young Woman Job Book : A Memoir

PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA

Copyright 2022 Emma Healey

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2022 by Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Best young woman job book : a memoir / Emma Healey.

Names: Healey, Emma, 1991- author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210257172 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210257202 | ISBN 9780735275003 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735275010 (EPUB)

Subjects: LCSH: Healey, Emma, 1991- | LCSH: Career changesCanadaAnecdotes. | LCSH: Job huntingCanadaAnecdotes. | CSH: Authors, Canadian (English)Biography. | LCGFT: Autobiographies.

Classification: LCC PS8615.E253 Z46 2022 | DDC C818/.603dc23

Text design: Lisa Jager

Cover art and design: Lisa Jager

a_prh_6.0_139577570_c0_r0

Then I remember more, more than I need to, about where I was living, and how I worked at my writing, driving myself relentlessly to do better and more, with moments of pleasure, but often a hounding sense of obligation, a fear that if I did not work terribly hard something would catch up with meperhaps the possibility that I did not really need to be doing this.

LYDIA DAVIS , Les Bluets, 1973

every week i go to the movies with Deragh and Doro, my two best friends. The Cineplex is across the street from an enormous mall in the centre of the city. To access it you have to ride three separate, steep escalators straight up. As you move into the heart of the building you pass through a constellation of globe-shaped lights, all hung from the ceiling on different lengths of wire, each glowing and dimming at its own steady pace. It is like ascending into a cloud of jellyfish inside a dream.

I like to get there early and extremely stoned, order a large popcorn with double butter, and spend a few minutes before my friends arrive contemplating the complex entanglement of art and commerce represented by the cinema. Sometimes, if theyre late, Ill play ten minutes on the Metallica pinball machine hidden in the back of the small, dingy arcade near the exit. It is one of the most forgiving machines in the city.

The best part of the night is when my friends arrive and suddenly, after being apart all week, were together. We have been doing this for years, and still, every time, when all three of us are settled in our seats amid a crowd of strangers in the dark, theres that moment when I can feel my mind slip into a lower gear.

When the movie is over we go to a bar around the corner. It occupies two floors of a large building: the ground-floor bar is moody and dark with an enormous fish tank, and the one upstairs is brightly lit and carpeted like a church basement. We pick our level based on our collective mood. Either way, when we sit close to the window we are all bathed in the cinematic red neon glow of the sign outside. They have a name for us here, like the three of us are a single person. We sing it with them, the same way, every time.

ONE

I have this photo of my parents, a few years into their relationship, sitting on the couch in my mothers apartment. The picture is over thirty years old, but nearly everything in it still exists in modified form. I pass by the apartment building almost every day on my way to work, but my mother hasnt lived in it since I was born. The beige couch theyre sitting on still anchors her living room, but its been reupholstered in deep green velvet. The couple in the photo look exactly like my mother and father, two people who are total strangers to me.

In the photo, my mother has big jeans, curly bangs and a wide grin. Shes wearing an excellent sweater: cape-like, cabled red and white, draped around her shoulders. My dad, next to her, is too skinny; his glasses are cartoon 80s, and his haircut has a touch of Eraserhead. He looks surprised. My mother seems entirely present and uncannily comfortable, like she could reach out of the photo to grab your hand. If you merged their faces together in a computer program you would end up with exactly me.

My parents divorced when I was three, before I was old enough to really know them as a couple. When my mother first showed me this photo, several years ago when she was cleaning out her basement, I felt like I was staring at an object brought back into the real world from a dream. A postcard from an alternate timeline. I framed and hung it on my living room wall.

Not long after I did this, my dad came to visit. I hadnt thought about the fact he was going to see the picture until it was too late. When he glimpsed it he jerked back reflexively, like hed touched an electric fence. Then he steadied himself and studied it. All of this took maybe three seconds, but it felt like a year. He stared at the picture, brow seriously furrowed, then turned to me.

This ishe said, but couldnt say what. I watched him hover for a moment above the situation, then snap back into place: Very weird.

His voice was taut with the tone of someone who wants plausible deniability; if you squinted, you could believe he was joking. But the picture clearly freaked him out. I wanted to ask whether it was the content of the image, or the fact that I owned and was displaying it in my house, or just the reminder that your past never belongs to you alone.

Work is one way to look at it. When my grandmother finished high school, she had the opportunity to continue her education, but her father needed her and her sister to start working full-time. She was a promising artist and an avid reader; she wanted to keep learning, but the family had rent to pay.

My grandmother worked at a few different places until she landed at an enormous publishing company. She started as a secretary and worked her way up the ladder until she became an assistant to one of the executives. Bosses loved her. She was fastidious and sensible, took perfect notes, wrote short- and longhand, never missed a detail. After work she would go to the library and check out as many books as she could carry. The money she made put my grandfather through law school. By the time my mother was born they had a son, a beautiful brick house in a nice part of town, two cars and a house in the country, a dog named Ginger and a cat named Rosie.