Emily Maloney
On medical literacy, the complications around writing about family, and the calming effects of horses.
Intimate conversations with our greatest heart-centered minds.
I first connected with Emily Maloney a few years ago when after a collective kerfuffle in a private writers’ group (which were far too common in those days) she bowed out with such honesty and aplomb I simply had to know this person. So I reached out to her. Whilst different in nature, I soon learned we shared complex health struggles, sensitive bodies, and bad reactions to drugs. Emily was writing about her experiences with the most fantastic combination of tenderness, humor, and laser sharp revelation—both personal and societal. Her work on this appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review and The Atlantic. And then in the winter of 2022, Cost of Living was published.
An often devastating collection of essays, Emily writes of being misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder and depression and put on twenty-six medications, each with varying side effects, only to discover she had a vitamin deficiency, hypothyroidism, and neurological based learning disorder. She promptly came off all the drugs. But the experience left a lasting mark—including massive debt for a hospitalization at only nineteen. She writes: “Sitting on a cot in the emergency room, I filled out paperwork certifying myself as the responsible party for my own medical care — signed it without looking, anchoring myself to this debt, a stone dropped in the middle of a stream. This debt was the cost of living.”
Woven into this are Emily’s experiences on the other side of the hospital bed: she’s worked as an ER tech, an EMT, a medical writer, amongst others and she brings tremendous empathy and insight to these positions. At one point, Emily was tasked with billing up patients but instead secretly reduced their rates.
It isn’t just money that unfurls her kindness. Emily explores a nationwide struggle with pain management, our often tenuous relationships with our bodies, the impact of dysfunctional families, and the ups and downs of therapy. With clarity, insider knowledge, and non-judgmental thoroughness, she exposes just how broken our medical system is. The book garnered a rave review from no less than Sarah Manguso in the New York Times Book Review, a starred review in Publishers Weekly, with blurbs from everyone from Alex Marzano-Lesnevich to Garrard Conley. And this month the paperback was released.
Emily has worked as an ER tech, EMT, medical writer, and drug rep as well as a dog groomer, pastry chef, and ceramicist. Her work has been included in Best American Essays and she’s twice been a McDowell fellow. I hope you enjoy our chat as much I did!
Next week: journalist Anne-Christine d’Adesky on activism back in the day and now, which includes eating fire.
When you were nineteen, you were misdiagnosed with mental illnesses and put on twenty-six different medications. It turns out you had hypothyroidism, a vitamin D deficiency, and neurologically based development issues. You write about this and the psychiatrist, Julie, who prescribed all these drugs with this somewhat emotionally contained voice. How do you feel about all of this now?
I was mad at Julie, but maybe not in the way that people hope. I don't know if there are any bad actors in my book. I think that everyone was doing the best they could with the resources they had. That’s why I put a lot of the blame on the systems that are in place, rather than individuals. Julie was human. And there were extenuating circumstances around my upbringing and around learning to be an adult with this undiagnosed developmental disability that I realize now I’d been trying to manage, mostly unsuccessfully. When I brought this information to my family, my mother said something like, “Oh, so this is what you have now.” As if this was part of the new diagnosis du jour, and not a way to understand my lived experience.
You agree to take all these drugs, even those you’re wary of, because “you wanted to do the right thing, even if she [Julie] didn’t always seem right.” Later you write: “I had believed doctors knew everything. That I could fix myself, my life, with the right doctor or the right medication or more money.” I don’t think you’re not alone in this. What are your thoughts on doctor/patient relationships after all you’ve lived through—on both the patient and tech side of things?