Description
‘Since I’ve had my first book published, I’ve earned more from cleaning than from writing. The home economics don’t add up.’
Between 2015 and 2021, Caitríona Lally published her first two novels, Eggshells and Wunderland. To buy her time to write during those years, she returned to the housekeeping department at Trinity College Dublin, a job she once held as a student. This begins a negotiation between the practical and creative demands of her life, further complicated when she becomes pregnant and almost impossible when the pandemic hits.
At Trinity, Lally and her colleagues move through empty, hallowed libraries and notice the cleaner-shaped blind spots of feminist conference attendees. At home, she is raising two children who don’t sleep. And the success of her first book makes her second novel seem even more arduous. For her own good, she leans into the hyperfocus of cleaning and running.
In her first memoir, Lally writes with scrupulous honesty and humour about the colliding parts of her selfhood: the mother who is a cleaner so that she can be a writer. Forward and thought-provoking, self-deprecating and soaked in her singularly frank voice, Caitríona Lally quietly but forcefully puzzles over personal economics and creativity to expose what ‘success’ and ‘failure’ can really mean in a writer’s life.
