‘Feminism is as basic to my sense of self as the fact that I have brown eyes.’
This is the story I tell: In the spring of 1972, I was twenty-five years old, unhappily married and living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Like many women I knew then, I joined a feminist consciousness-raising group, to which I belonged for six months until I left my husband and moved across the countr…
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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.
‘Anglophilia is constantly thrumming on, or just under, the surface of our culture.’
‘I think people who ape the sentiments of others often go on to believe the thing they said. It becomes their opinion.’
Juliet Jacques and Iphgenia Baal discuss early digital cultures, precarity and social architecture.
‘Postures of graceful receptivity, or surrender. How do we tell the difference?’
A.K. Blakemore introduces Suzie Howell’s photographs.
‘I want the reader to be conscious of reading and not being just drawn into the book and forgetting themselves and forgetting their life.’
Claire-Louise Bennett on her novel Checkout 19.
‘There’s this paradoxical nostalgia where even though yi suffered, yi miss it.’
Memoir by Graeme Armstrong.
‘I’ve occasionally caught a kind of self-consciousness stalking me when I write about New Zealand.’
