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Overqualified Joey Comeau Books

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Overqualified Joey Comeau Books

This was a very fun, very different read. It was also super short (~100 pages?) which made it nice to read quickly. The book is made up of cover letters from the author Joey Comeau applying to every job under the sun. But the cover letters are a twist on traditional cover letters, in that he uses them to illustrate a part of his life and sort of tie it to the company. For example, in applying to General Electric, he describes a memory of him and his brother running up a stairwell at their apartment complex when they were children, stealing the light bulbs from each level, and then throwing them off the top of the building to watch the light bulbs explode below. The writing is very funny, but also dark and a little twisted. Joey seems like a smart guy, but deeply unhappy with his life and he uses these cover letters as an emotional outlet I thought it was a great read.


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Overqualified Joey Comeau Books Reviews

Hilarious and dark - really fun to read aloud, polished it off in about an hour.
Overqualified is a hilarious compilation of cover letters. If you're feeling sad and blue, just read one at random. There's a dark story threaded through a few of them, but they're very readable on their own. I love this book, and feel superior to others because I own it.
I first came across Joey through his web comic A Softer World. From there I started reading some of his cover letters, but piecemeal and without context. I enjoyed them thoroughly for the humor and outlandishness and when I saw a book was coming out, I ordered it immediately. When it arrived, I knew that it would be a relatively quick read, but I didn't expect to read it all in one sitting. This is in part because of the format of short, captivating letters that leave you wanting just a little more, which can be found in the next brief letter, but mostly due to the subplot that weaves the letters together. When reading a handful of these online, I never found the tie between the stories; I viewed them as comical one-offs meant to amuse HR departments. Having these letters in order and in context gives the reader a chilling tale of the effect of loss on one man.

This is a fantastic book that I would recommend to anyone, and in fact already have to numerous people. Having a brother myself, this book particularly struck a chord with me, but anyone will appreciate the emotion of loss, the memories it conjures, and the grief it leaves behind. Everyone needs an outlet and Joey found his through cover letters. I'd say he came away better for it.
Just absolutely brilliant.
This book is freaking amazing. I cannot express how beautiful and personal and insane and glorious these stories are. They are ridiculous and irreverent and the sort of too-true fictions I wish everyone liar could tell (Yes dear -I'm talking about you). They are a biting, honest commentary on the state of our world, one that cannot be expressed, much less heard, without a double-handed punch of the absurd to make us gasp for breath after a lungfull of the dry and bitter, choking dust of the truth. I wanted to buy three copies because there are three people in my life who would die laughing -and gladly if they read this book. But screw them, they can find their own deaths I'm keeping this one for myself.
It all started when Joey Comeau needed a job. Somewhere along the way he began to exercise a little more creativity than perhaps is optimum in job application cover letters, and he published those cover letter on his Web site. Some are hilarious, some are poignant, some are just plain odd. None of them are bound by any sort of requirement to tell the truth.

He didn't get any of those jobs.

After the police showed up on his doorstep one morning, he stopped actually sending the cover letters in. He continued to compose them, however, and post them on his Web site. By then there was no pretense of actually wanting the job, of course. He wrote them because he liked to do it and they were good. Overqualified is his effort to use this form to tell an actual story. Each letter would in itself be significant, but when strung end-to-end they would reveal a larger story, at first hinted at and subsequently revealed.

Put another way, it's "take what you're doing already and repackage it in a way that you can sell." And thus, Overqualified was born. It is very good.

It is a book of moments, beads on a string that form a larger pattern. Some of those moments are pretty powerful. Some of them aren't. They go by quickly and before you know it you're at the end of a brief autobiography told in nuggets of nonsense.

My perception of the book was colored somewhat by my previous experience with the cover letters on his Web site. I was a little disappointed, I guess, that many of the supposed cover letters in the book had no ties to the job being applied for. One of the fun things about the letters I referred to above is the cleverness with which he twists the job descriptions, and the decidedly odd ways he represents himself as a candidate. While it does happen occasionally in the book, I missed that cleverness much of the time.

Of course, before there was a larger story to tell, the letters were all about cleverness. This book has a larger purpose.

Comeau certainly has a gift with language. The words he chooses are often evocative as well as descriptive, and a sense of tragedy grows as we move along. He's at his best when he's both funny and poignant, as near the end when he applies to be a tour guide, revisiting the scenes of past failures. That bit alone is probably worth the cost of admission.
I'm a big fan of Joey Comeau, originally from reading A Softer World. He has, in everything he does, a way of distilling to a few words all the broadness of feelings and sensations that make up an experience. I got this book back during the recession when I was in the middle of a frustrating job hunt, and the relief of commiseration was outstanding.

I started off reading the blog and got the book later. When it came in the mail I handed it to one of my roommates and asked him to read the Credico letter out loud to everyone. He started off enthusiastically and then trailed off quietly on the first "titties." The debate for and against continuing played across his face slowly. Worth the purchase price in its entirety.
This was a very fun, very different read. It was also super short (~100 pages?) which made it nice to read quickly. The book is made up of cover letters from the author Joey Comeau applying to every job under the sun. But the cover letters are a twist on traditional cover letters, in that he uses them to illustrate a part of his life and sort of tie it to the company. For example, in applying to General Electric, he describes a memory of him and his brother running up a stairwell at their apartment complex when they were children, stealing the light bulbs from each level, and then throwing them off the top of the building to watch the light bulbs explode below. The writing is very funny, but also dark and a little twisted. Joey seems like a smart guy, but deeply unhappy with his life and he uses these cover letters as an emotional outlet I thought it was a great read.