Emily Maloney understands the country's medical crisis intimately. She's worked as an emergency room technician, but also has extensive experience as a patient.

Embedding herself into various corners of the bureaucratic medical machine, Maloney describes everyone she encounters with the same perspicacity.

Somehow, she never seems to lapse into bleak cynicism. Even when Maloney is caustic, even when she observes and describes with a gonzo spirit, she remains sympathetic to the people caught up in the system.

'Cost of Living' — an indictment of the exorbitant costs of staying alive in America, and the weight of being hounded by a debt that reduces your life to dollars and cents — opens Maloney's debut essay collection of the same name. It's a powerful opening shot, but in the essays that follow, which recount Maloney's experiences as patient, caregiver, observer, and pharmaceutical industry worker, she stumbles before regaining the clarity of purpose and rigor of probing that 'Cost of Living' promises ...The six [essays] that follow the titular piece feel as though they are narrated from underwater ...Among the murkiest essays is 'Clipped'.

This is the power of Maloney’s debut, as she highlights not only how internal suffering can become external trauma, but also how capitalism monetizes both, and places a price tag on our very lives.

Maloney’s debut collection of essays is an intimate view of the United States health care system from her perspective as both a patient and a caregiver. She narrates her personal experiences as a patient in the U.S. mental health system, clearly depicting an aspect of health care that doesn’t currently help people in need.

Emily Maloney relays the reality of so many.

Maloney artfully unpacks the fraught connection between money and health in her brilliant debut collection.

Candid.