"A Broom of One's Own" a slice of life from a housecleaner's perspective

"A Broom of One's Own: Words on Writing, Housecleaning and Life"

by Nancy Peacock

HarperPerennial, 189 pp., $13.95

BOOK REVIEW |

If a writer wanted to discover slices of life, everything from dirty toilets to dozens of designer shoes, what better place to look than in someone's private home?

Where else would you meet Jack, the dog who habitually lifts his leg and pees on kitchen cabinets; or Mrs. Clark, who has pictures of anyone who ever rented the apartment above her garage; or Dr. Gunther, who hung a wizened scrotum on his wall?

Nancy Peacock didn't clean houses because she particularly liked the job. But she was a writer, a published award-winning novelist, who needed the money. Housecleaning gave her both ammunition and the privacy to contemplate her next writing project.

In her new book, "A Broom of One's Own: Words on Writing, Housecleaning and Life," Peacock offers an entertaining glimpse into the lives of the rich, told through the stories of the houses she cleaned.

"When people I'd known for years stopped me in the grocery store to ask about my writing, I squirmed," Peacock wrote. "I'd just finished cleaning a house. I was dirty and I smelled like bleach, and the questioner assumed a success which I could not pretend to under these conditions. I was sensitive on the subjects of writing and housecleaning. They prickled on my skin like an accidental spritz of Tilex."

On her home page (www.nancypeacocksbooks.com) Peacock, who didn't go to college, lists all the jobs she's held, 22 in all, from a locksmith to a stall mucker at a horse farm.

Today, she's a writing teacher in North Carolina.

In "A Broom of One's Own," she talks of arriving at a gated community and waiting in line while the guard questioned each visitor, always asking a question about the weather.

Remembering that ritual, she writes, "At the beginning of my writing life I believed that writing could, besides making me rich, also make me invulnerable. It might have been the stupidest thought I ever had, because there is nothing, with the exception of love, that has ever made me feel more vulnerable than writing and publishing," Peacock wrote.

"Not housecleaning. Not living from paycheck to paycheck. And not waiting in line at the Promised Land for the guard to raise the magic gate. If anything, writing has finally taught me that there is no magic gate. And that all the walls we build, we build first inside ourselves."

Peacock writes about listening to books-on-tape while she cleans and of snooping in her customers' closets, counting the number of shoes and shirts and even shampoo bottles. "On one boring vacuuming trip into Mrs. Cooper's closet I amused myself by counting her shoes," Peacock wrote. "She had 44 pairs ... Since I am always collecting details and notice things for my writing, I called this research."

Peacock said she cleaned houses professionally for 15 years, and has written for 42. The day she quit housekeeping, she drove by a Dumpster, stopped and threw away all her supplies. "I drove away feeling light and naked, as if I'd just broken the spell of a bad relationship."

Susan Gilmore: 206-464-2054 or sgilmore@seattletimes.com