by Joey Comeau
“There have been spoof letter-writing books in the past, like The Lazlo Letters by Don Novello (a.k.a. Father Guido Sarducci) and several that followed. While the protagonist in Overqualified is just as unhinged as his predecessors, he’s significantly less giddy. A real story unfolds in these pages, about a departed brother and the sibling left behind. It’s sad and fragmented and, in places, funny. This slender epistolary novel is charming.”
— Los Angeles Times
“[A] collection of wry, clever and demoniacal job-application letters, teeming with knife-edged malice and stomach-tearing hilarity. . . . Overqualified successfully deludes the fear of the faceless corporate entity by empowering the faceless applicant who has nothing to lose except securing a job he or she probably doesn’t want. If Comeau’s rebel-yell manifesto catches on like old Prometheus’s gift did all those years ago, human resources will never be the same again.”
— Globe and Mail
“Joey Comeau’s collection of real cover letters, Overqualified (ECW Press) is pretty much sui generis. Not to mention sweetly written, bitter and bitterly funny. . . . One of the season’s most remarkable books.”
— Macleans.ca
“The letters are by turns hilarious and tragic, highly inappropriate and oversharing. The novel that results is both extremely funny and extremely sad, and above all, original — I’ve never read anything like it, and I want to read it again and again. . . . [Comeau] is a preternaturally skilled novelist, and he’s written one of the most original and most affecting books I’ve read in years.”
— Bookslut
“Joey Comeau’s Overqualified is Robert Silverberg’s Dying Inside as redone by Steve Aylett. It’s Don Novello’s The Lazlo Letters as reinterpreted by Stanislaw Lem. It’s Judy Blume’s Are you There God? It’s me, Margaret as chewed up and spit out by J. G. Ballard. This epistolary fantasia viscerally captures the insanity of capitalism and the marketplace and blends it with domestic and personal anguish to produce a book whose melancholy is leavened by a surprising hilarity. These are the awesomely goofy files of some alien or celestial Human Resources Department, delivered straight to your door as if by the Smoking Gun website.”
— Paul Di Filippo, author of The Steampunk Trilogy and Cosmocopia
“If I were one of the lucky hr managers who received an Overqualified cover letter, I’m not sure I’d hire Joey Comeau. But I am sure that the next time I found myself lying awake in bed at 3 am, I’d be reaching for his number.”
— Ryan North, Dinosaur Comics
“Each letter rapidly digresses into something more akin to a diary entry than a professional missive. There is speculation as to humanity’s future, reminiscences from the narrator’s childhood, confessions of vulnerability and of sexual desire, all punctuated by vitriolic humour and unsettling instances of violence. There is much frustration in these letters — born of capitalism’s absurdities and of personal calamities — but there is also humour, compassion, and joy.”
— Quill & Quire
“Overqualified is unlike anything you’ve ever read. Each of Joey Comeau’s letters comments, sometimes subtly, sometimes not, on the emptiness of the system to which we bow during a job search while it simultaneously reveals the humor, beauty, and pain that is all else in life, which, Joey Comeau wants you to realize, is short.”
— About.com
A sometimes-hilarious, sometimes-crushingly sad romp through a man’s swelling nihilism and disenchantment. . . . This book is very much about nostalgia for a past of exaggerated quirks and curious beauty. So many of us are compelled to believe these things are on the fringes, are odd and unordinary, but this little novella, much like Miranda July of David Eggers’ stories, tries to portray these things unashamedly, as ‘something that feels perfect and correct.’”
— MonstersAndCritics.com
“[Overqualified] has found a permanent home in my collection of books that have changed the way I look at and think about the world around me. . . . The book is chaotic and contradictory; incomplete, yet full of life; full of charm and wit and character.”
— The Uniter
“Joey Comeau’s new novel Overqualified delivers an addictively humorous and dark alternative to the stone-cold task of getting employers to know you through a piece of paper. . . . Overqualified is a quick read, but crackles with hilarious desperation and deadpan sincerity. With these humorous letters, Comeau reveals how life is actually lived, and not just marketed.”
— FFWD
“I guarantee that you will laugh out-loud at least once and that you will try to share what was so funny with someone who will just stare at you like you are a freak.”
— 410Media.com
“The sincerity with which he writes is mesmerizing, and even though each cover letter is a scant two pages, they’re full of painful emotion. It’s a unique way to tell a story and definitely worth checking out.”
— The Arizona Daily Wildcat
“Overqualified is the type of book you don’t read, you devour. Because the book is a series of letters, it’s short, and you can read it at your leisure. Maybe you can finish it in an afternoon, but you’ll never truly stop reading it. Years from now, you’ll unbind your tattered first edition, flip through the pages and reread an especially meaningful letter.”
— Jack Central
“Overqualified fears no depths. It is unpredictably humorous. It is intriguingly disgusting. It is profoundly sad. And it’s sexy, in ways we might not admit out loud. The narrator’s internal complexities make the usually sterile cover letter form pulse with breath and blood. . . . If you’ve ever felt crazy, this book will help you realize that you’re not alone. If you’ve ever felt normal, this book will show you what you’ve been missing.”
— Austinist
“[A] magnificent and timely curiosity . . . The letters are baffling and amusing at times, poignant or obsessive on other occasions. . . . During a time of economic uncertainty — when the practical and the existential seem eerily akin — Overqualified expresses the irrepressible humanity at the heart of our industries, and affirms the fruits of our many labours.”
— Scene Magazine
“For anyone who has had the grievous task of summing up the core of their experience and extracting suitable parts of their personality to submit in a cover letter, author Joey Comeau’s novel, Overqualified, is a breath of fresh air.”
— Buzzine
“Ranging from pithy and heartwarming to darkly funny and bizarre, the letters sparkle with the inappropriate use of unabashed personal honesty in a traditionally dry and humourless form. . . . [Overqualified is] beautifully executed satire, perfect for anyone who needs a good laugh (like the unemployed).”
— Geist
Copyright © Joey Comeau, 2010
Published by ECW Press, 2120 Queen Street East, Suite 200,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4E 1E2 / 416.694.3348 / [email protected]
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Comeau, Joey, 1980-
One bloody thing after another / Joey Comeau.
ISBN 978-1-55022-916-5
I. Title.
PS8605.O537O54 2010 C813’.6 C2009-905969-X
Editor for the press: Michael Holmes / a misFit book
Layout and design: Rachel Ironstone
Cover image: Emily Horne
&
nbsp; The publication of One Bloody Thing After Another has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada, by the Ontario Arts Council, by the Government of Ontario through Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit, by the OMDC Book Fund, an initiative of the Ontario Media Development Corporation, and by the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).
For Maggie and for Hamilton
i
The window in the upstairs hallway is open. No wonder it was so cold last night. Ann slides it closed, hard, and goes down to the kitchen. There’s a bowl of cereal laid out for her breakfast, and Ann’s younger sister Margaret is already shoveling food into her face. Milk dribbles down Margaret’s chin. There’s cereal all over the tabletop.
“You’re disgusting,” Ann says. “Your friends will wait for you, you know. You don’t have to choke it down like that.”
“Hey, go slow,” their mother says, coming into the kitchen. She’s dressed up, in a gray-and-white suit, and she twirls once for her daughters. “What do you think?” she says. “Professional? Hire-able? Is the red scarf too much?”
“You look great, Mom,” Ann tells her. Margaret just keeps eating. Their mother bends down to get something from the floor. It’s a couple seconds before Ann realizes that her mother hasn’t come up again. She leans over, and sees that her mom wasn’t picking something up at all. She’s crouched down, holding a hand to her throat.
“Are you okay?” Ann says.
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine, Ann.” Her mother clears her throat. “Sorry. I just have something. . . .” she clears her throat again louder, and then stands up, smiling. She clears her throat again. Then again.
Even Margaret is looking up from her cereal. Their mother coughs. And then she coughs harder. There’s a bit of blood on her lips now.
She smiles.
“Wish me luck today!” she says.
ii
Ann’s mother was perfectly qualified, but her interview did not go well. Afterward, she ran out of the conference room holding her red scarf over her mouth, leaving two men, Jeff and Alex, sitting in silence for a long time.
Between the two of them they have interviewed thousands of men and women for various jobs. It has never before gone so ridiculously badly. They’re just sitting there. They should clean this up and call the next applicant. They’re on a schedule, after all. But instead they sit in silence.
Alex looks at the door where she ran out, and then he looks at the wet, bloody chunk of god-knows-what sitting on the table in front of them. The thing she coughed up, partway through the interview. That poor woman.
“That did not go well,” Jeff says.
He can joke because none of the blood landed on him.
1
Charlie worries sometimes that his dog is an idiot. When Mitchie wants to lie down, he just falls over on his side. When he gets excited, he pees a little. But what can Charlie do? You can’t take a dog back after fifteen years and say, “You gave me a lemon.” Charlie’s too old to find another dog, anyway.
At the end of his leash, Mitchie is laid out on his side in the middle of the crosswalk, panting. In a minute these cars are going to start honking, but right now the drivers are probably struck dumb at the sight of a dog this stupid.
“God damn it, Mitchie,” Charlie says. “Come on.”
Tell
2
There are tree branches on the ground in the backyard. They’re not attached to the tree, like branches ought to be. They’re severed. Sawed off. This was Jackie’s first-kiss tree, and it used to hang over the backyard, back when this was Jackie’s yard. Back when 10 Osborne Street was her address and the curtains were blue.
Two blocks down that way is her broken-arm tree. She has a car-accident tree, too. There is a tree at the hospital where Jackie’s mother passed away into the long goodnight. And when Jackie gets lonely, or sad, she goes and she finds one of her trees.
Her first kiss was with a boy named Carl when she was ten years old. Carl told everyone at school that they’d made out. He said she kissed him and that he put his hand up her shirt. For one week Jackie was the great big slut of grade 5.
But she didn’t kiss him. He kissed her. And in return he got kicked in the shin. At the time it didn’t even seem important. It was just one more stupid thing she was supposed to like but didn’t. Jackie doesn’t even really remember the kiss.
She remembers how Carl’s mother came to pick him up that day, and that dog jumped out of the back of the car and ran right at Jackie, smelling like the woods and like fire and like the ocean, all at the same time.
But it was her first kiss, and the first sign of her indifference to boys. She’d been indifferent before then, of course. But indifference is hard to notice until you’re in a situation where you’re supposed to care.
Jackie visits her trees and she remembers. Or sometimes she doesn’t remember. It helps just to sit under them. It’s familiar. And her trees are always okay. They have a nice little visit together and Jackie goes home.
But today is different. Today there are branches everywhere, bright wood exposed. Her tree is cut down. And Jackie bites the inside of her cheek to keep calm.
She knocks on the front door of the house, all gentle and polite like a lady. Like a gentlewoman. She knocks again. The door has a knocker, below the big Welcome sign. Jackie makes herself smile, in case she looks as angry as she feels. Her father always says, “Anger never solves anything.”
Mrs. Hubert answers the door.
“Pardon me, ma’am,” Jackie says.
“Oh hello, dear.” Mrs. Hubert is in a housecoat. Jackie is wearing her Sunday best.
“Pardon me, ma’am. I’m sorry to interrupt your Sunday, but I just wondered if I could ask you a question. What happened to that big, old tree in your backyard?” Jackie says. And Jackie smiles. She is all sweetness, prim and proper.
“Oh, we needed some light back there,” Mrs. Hubert says, smiling back at her. “Jim bought a barbeque, but it’s always so dark. We thought, wouldn’t it be nicer for the grandkids if there were some sunlight back there in the afternoon? My son came out this morning with his chainsaw. It really opens up the backyard, don’t you think?”
“Oh, it certainly does.” Jackie is chewing the inside of her cheek. She keeps thinking, anger doesn’t solve anything, but she can taste blood.
“Are . . . are you bleeding?” Mrs. Hubert says. “Your lips!”
And then, violence. Jackie picks up the biggest rock she can find, and she carries it to the driveway. She puts it right through the window of Mrs. Hubert’s car. Smash. It feels good. She loves that sound exactly because it makes no sense. There’s broken glass on the pavement and everywhere. It’s on the car seats and on Jackie’s dark sneakers. All her arm hair is standing up. Her muscles are warm. Her mouth tastes like blood.
Mrs. Hubert, of 10 Osborne Street, won’t be calling her dear again anytime soon. Jackie’s Sunday best gave the old woman an incorrect first impression. Mrs. Hubert saw a young girl, clean and well dressed, fancy black pants and a nice white shirt, and she thought it was one of the proper young ladies from her church. It wasn’t. It was one of those proper young ladies she sees being helped into police cruisers on the tv news at night.
So now Mrs. Hubert has her front door locked, to keep Jackie out. It’s a heavy wooden door, with a sign in the center that has the word Welcome burned into it. The curtains look like lace in the small half circle window at the top. This would be easier if Mrs. Hubert didn’t look so scared. She’s yelling something that Jackie can’t hear. Police, police, police. Something like that. She has a phone in her hand.
Jackie looks like the bad guy here. Mrs. Hubert is crying and Jackie is all covered with violence and broken glass. But Jackie isn’t the bad guy. The tree was
cut down. Jackie’s first-kiss tree. And so Jackie is angry. But she didn’t start smashing things right away. She went over to the house. She rang the doorbell. She was a nice young lady with some questions about that old tree in the backyard.
“Pardon me, ma’am,” Jackie had said.
“Oh hello, dear,” Mrs. Hubert said.
Jackie is just as surprised as anybody. She didn’t come out here to break windows. She came out here to visit her tree. When she got off the bus, there was no blood in her mouth at all. She was quiet, thinking about her friend Ann. Visiting her trees always helps Jackie think. But now her thoughts are thinking themselves for her. Her body knows what to do. She lifts up the second big rock. She’s confused by how heavy it is. She almost can’t handle it. It’s been a long time since she lifted anything this heavy.
She aches. She stumbles a bit. How many trees get cut down every day? What if every one of those trees had someone who cared? Someone to avenge it? Jackie is just a good girl, doing her part for the environment. Smash!
Now there are two big rocks in the shiny, gray car. She leans her head in through the window of Mrs. Hubert’s car and brushes the glass off the passenger seat rock. She pulls the seat belt across and fastens it securely. She tugs to make sure it doesn’t come undone.
The rock looks so handsome with the black seat belt around it. So does the first rock. This is nice. It paints a pretty picture. Out for a Sunday drive with the windows down.
Mister and Missus Rock.
Lovely.
“I’m calling the police!” yells Mrs. Hubert from inside. She has the window open a crack. She doesn’t sound angry; she should sound angry, she should get righteous about her car windows. She’s supposed to be the bad guy, not the victim. But she has her lines all wrong. She sounds scared. “Please stop,” she says.