‘Writing is expensive, and it takes a long time’: publishing as picaresque in Emma Healey’s Best Young Woman Job Book

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article discusses Emma Healey’s 2022 Best Young Woman Job Book as an instance of a contemporary publishing picaresque: stories that track creative work in today’s conditions of acute scarcity and struggle, and that connect conditions for writers to a more generalised experience of economic struggle both in and beyond the creative industries. Healey deploys the picaresque as a politicised aesthetic, while ironising the figure of the struggling writer, and the structure of the bildungsroman, as forms engendering commitment to one’s own exploitation and unravelling. Her work partakes of and advances a broader antiwork wariness about the forms of complicity, compromise, self-silencing, and coercion required to get ahead given worsening conditions of literary work in its late age of destitution and disinvestment.