An Unemployed Girl’s Review of a Novel on Unemployment

The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter makes a fine primer on unemployment for the uninitiated. But for the over-educated and under-employed (me, for example) that the protagonist Matt Prior is based on, it can be plain unsettling at times to discover your anxious likeness captured and distilled into eloquent, neatly packaged prose.

Matt is aptly named, as the recession has gone and rubbed its dirty feet all over him. But his hare-brained career choices are as much to blame for his situation as the forces of Wall Street.

Love in the Time of Layoff: Unemployment Jacked Up My Libido

Up until recently, if anyone had bothered to ask about my sex drive (which they never did), I would have said it was normal. I enjoyed sex as much as the next woman. But like many urban professionals, I was often too busy thinking about, say, the implications of some new regulation to give much thought to the sexual impulses that spiraled through my brain each day like dust motes.

Now that I have traded in my dry-cleaned, button-down, inoffensively colored work shirts for a set of neon green pajamas, the dust is gathering attention.

If I’m any example, unemployed girls do it better–or at least they want to do it more. Layoff has sent my libido to frenzied new heights…