One night forty years ago Helen Cerruti left her husband. They were living together at the time with their two little girls on the top floor of a big Edwardian house, in a respectable street where the houses sat back behind well-tended gardens and knobbled lime trees with blotchy bark surged up like…
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‘I think there should be a National Service of Hospitality. The best way to see the true face of humanity is to serve it a plate of chips.’
Camilla Grudova on bad-mannered customers.
‘Anyone who has ever worked night shifts will understand the vertiginous feeling that comes with staring down the day from the wrong end.’
A.K. Blakemore on working nights.
‘I was constantly reading job ads, trying to find my holy grail – a job I could stand to do, and someone foolish enough to hire me.’
Sandra Newman on learning how to play professional blackjack.
‘I loved being a receptionist. What I loved about it was playing the part of being a receptionist.’
Emily Berry on being a temporary office worker.
‘Every part of you would swell, including your eyeballs, and no matter how much water you drank, you were always dehydrated.’
Junot Díaz on working for a steel mill.
‘Literature is that odd paradox: an artifice that somehow truthfully engages the reader, the mind, the emotions, the self, in essential communion.’
‘We had each needed the other for something, which wasn’t kindness or love. We’d both had dry husks for our hearts, that day.’
‘She wondered if she would have the audacity, when the time came, to let herself go like that.’
‘I’m miscarrying a pregnancy, she said, when the spasm seemed to have passed.—It’s a fine mess.’
‘She relished the thought of his rather ravaged fifty-five-year-old and oh-so-male head against her broderie anglaise pillowcases.‘
