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Gig
A book of Americans talking about their jobs at the turn of the millennium
Why it’s worth your time
Gig gathers more than 120 Americans describing their jobs in their own words around 2000, from a Wal-Mart greeter and a steelworker to a film producer. If you're starting out or curious about a field, a few monologues can show you the people, the pace and the small frustrations that a job title leaves out.
What different jobs are like, in workers' own words
The book · About 12 hours of reading · Buy or borrow
How to get it
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- Start with the section nearest a job you're curious about.
The monologues are grouped by field, such as Food and Media, and can be read in any order. Read three from the section closest to a job you're considering, then one from a field you know nothing about.
- Sort each job into enjoy and struggle.
After each monologue, write one thing about that job you'd enjoy and one you'd struggle with, beyond the title and the pay: the pace, the people, the boss, the customers. After a handful, look at what keeps showing up on each side.
Good moments for this: while you're choosing a first jobwhen a field you've never tried starts to tempt youon a long train ride
Keep going with Truest
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- It actually happensWe’ll put it on your calendar and remind you before it starts.
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Making it work for you
Every workplace is different. Here’s what to think about before you start, and what might get in the way.
Things to think about
Keeping the other side's workday in mind can make the hard parts of a service job easier to carry, and it tends to make you easier to deal with when you're the customer.
What might make this harder
Preview a section before you share it. Some monologues are profane or sexual, and the grouping by field makes it easy to skip to the ones that fit.
Questions people ask
What is Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs about?
It's an oral history from 2000 of more than 120 people describing their work, put together by three editors: John Bowe, Marisa Bowe and Sabin Streeter. About 40 interviewers contributed to the book, which grew out of a column in the editors' webzine, and it mixes a few famous names with many ordinary jobs, from a telemarketing supervisor to a long-haul trucking couple.
How is Gig different from Studs Terkel's Working?
Gig's editors took Working as their model and applied it to the economy of the late 1990s, about a quarter of a century later. Susan Faludi, in praise quoted on the publisher's page, found Gig's stories more politically charged than Terkel's.
Is Gig about the gig economy?
No. Gig was published in 2000, when gig was mostly slang for any job, years before app-based contract work took over the word. It's about work of every kind at the turn of the millennium.
What it says, and how it holds up
Read enough of these monologues side by side and patterns show up that no listing would mention. Noel Murray, reviewing it for the AV Club in 2002, saw people who left school for jobs they didn't want, kept their humor, and had an eye on a dream job somewhere else. What they hope to leave behind, in Murray's reading, is obstinate people and time-wasting tasks. He also noticed small swells of pride in knowledge only someone in that job would have, which may be encouraging if you're starting out.
The book began as Work, a weekly column in the webzine Word that the editors modeled on Working. Some 40 interviewers contributed, John Bowe crossed the country taping people, and Marisa Bowe has said the aim was to record whatever they found without imposing a theme. Ann Guidry, reviewing it for the Austin Chronicle in 2000, described monologues as personal and uncensored, some funny and some heartbreaking, from a corporate lawyer who'd lost faith in people to a married trucking team delighted with their life on the road.
The interviewers' questions are left off the page, Murray noted, so you never see what was asked. Without the questions, in his view, the interviewers' own biases stay out of sight. The economy in it is also the one of 2000, before smartphones, so the jobs and pay can look dated. If your question is about app-based gig work today, the book predates it, and current research such as the Pew Research Center's surveys of gig platform workers tends to be a better guide.
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Picked by Truest and described in our own words. The original belongs to its creator. Last updated October 9, 2026. We sell a career membership; where that’s relevant above, we say so.