And You Send it Anyway: Overqualified [Book Review]
Overqualified, by A Softer World’s Joey Comeau, dispenses with everything your Career Advisor told you and lets its story unfold through the secrets, nightmares, rage, hopes, and memories of the narrator, as revealed through cover letters written to various companies. Many of these letters were actually sent, but after a humorless HR representative sent the cops to Comeau’s door, he kept the letters to his internet audience. Consider this suggestion, to Nintendo:
We need a new Mario game, where you rescue the princess in the first ten minutes, and for the rest of the game you try and push down that sick feeling in your stomach that she's "damaged goods", a concept detailed again and again in the profoundly sex negative instruction booklet, and when Luigi makes a crack about her and Bowser, you break his nose and immediately regret it. When Peach asks you, in the quiet of her mushroom castle bedroom "do you still love me?" you pretend to be asleep. You press the A button rhythmically, to control your breath, keep it even.
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. In an ideal world, job application would be an exploration, and Comeau's expedition offers catharsis to anyone who has ever had to render their ambitions more business-friendly.
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.
