Job Hopper:
The Checkered Career of a Down-Market Dilettante
The best thing about working a series of low-paying, crappy day jobs is revisiting them in a memoir.
Selling hippie clothing seemed like a great way to meet people. And it probably would have been if I’d been selling it out of a van in the parking lot of a Grateful Dead show…
“Hilarious and painful … Takes me back to my days of working a series of flunky jobs, before I settled on one to keep for thirty-five years.”
–Harvey Pekar, author of
American Splendor
The food at Turman’s was great, but the service was kind of crappy. For example, I once responded to a concerned regular’s inquiry about my recent absence with a blow-by-blow description of my bladder infection.
“The bad-job memoir…has brought out the bitter best in writers ever since George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London … Two brilliant examples are A Working Stiff’s Manifesto by Iain Levison and Job Hopper by Ayun Halliday.”
–William Grimes,
The New York Times
Oddly, the gruesome realities of the endlessly flawed human body never bother me when I’ve got someone on the massage table…
“Actress and writer Halliday proves that the slacker life doesn’t end at 25.”
–Dylan Foley, The New York Post
