- penguin.com
- The book that changed my life
I come from a line of people who do not clean. According to family legend, my grandmother attempted it as a young bride and hated it so much, she took a job as a schoolteacher in order to pay a cleaning woman to come in three days a week. I deeply admire her for this.
This is a long way of saying I am profoundly grateful for Jolie Kerr’s new book My Boyfriend Barfed in My Handbag . . . And Other Things You Can’t Ask Martha. Kerr writes a column called Ask a Clean Person, which originated on the Hairpin and has since moved to Jezebel and Deadspin. (I love this tacit acknowledgement, by the way, that dudes should know how to clean, too.) She won my heart back in the Hairpin days when she helped a reader transform her bedroom from a filthy hoarder lair into a livable space suitable for entertaining gentleman callers. She was calm, she was encouraging, she did not judge, and, best of all, she broke the task down into manageable chunks and then guided the reader, step by step, though all of them. It was magnificent! And it worked.
As it so happened, a perfect opportunity presented itself yesterday morning: our refrigerator had developed a smell so awful that my boyfriend gagged every time he opened the door. It smelled like rancid dairy product, but it was hard to tell where it was coming from. Since I have the weaker gag reflex, the cleaning job was all mine.
