The Freshness of Wonder

One evening, near the end of a literary festival, the novelist Nancy Peacock fell into conversation with a fellow writer:

“Good reading,” he said. “But why did you tell them you’d never been to college? And why did you tell them you worked in a grocery store and cleaned houses for a living?”

“Because it’s true,” I said. . . .

“You shouldn’t tell people that,” he said.

“But it’s the truth.”

He pursed his lips and spoke slowly, as if to a child. “What I am trying to tell you is that no one is interested.”

For many artists outside the academy, such conversations are the stuff of nightmares. At issue isn’t necessarily the disconnect between those of us who work with our hands and those of us who work with our heads. Numerous university artists and intellectuals also weed their own gardens, and some of them repair their own leaky roofs. It’s one thing to be a middle-aged published writer with a graduate degree who splits her own firewood, but it’s another thing entirely to be a middle-aged published writer without any degree who earns six dollars an hour by splitting other people’s firewood. There’s an uneasy rift between these camps, one that stretches beyond problems of aesthetic quality or sophistication of knowledge to the question of how “real” writers choose to earn their keep.

Nancy Peacock’s memoir, A Broom of One’s Own, bravely addresses this rift—specifically the condescension that “no one is interested” in how the menial unromantic labors of a paid housecleaner might intersect with a writer’s imaginative freedom and habits of literary production. I say bravely because there are few public models to encourage a thinking, feeling woman who also gets paid to scrub grape jelly off the floor. Yet, though she acknowledges that the job of housecleaner is particularly fraught for poor, undereducated, overburdened women, her book is not a feminist call to arms. Nor, despite her anecdotal style, does she rehash “the comic trials of a housewife” genre once so popular in syndicated columns and the Reader’s Digest. She attempts instead to explicate the link between the dull repetitions of physical work and a mind’s ability to open its attention to what Keats calls those “nothings which are made Great and dignified by an ardent pursuit.” “Often writing is not thinking, it’s noticing,” Peacock tells us, “and by working a job that allowed me to use my body and be in solitude and quiet, I had opened my life to noticing. I never planned it that way. It just happened.”

Though she has published two reasonably successful novels, Peacock does not portray herself as a sophisticated reader. Yet, unexpectedly, her literary and intellectual innocence is one of the memoir’s most attractive aspects. She modestly shows us what she has discovered about labor and imagination; and, even when her observations are not particularly new or acute, she conveys the freshness of her wonder. Always she is astute about the moral chasms that yawn between employers and servants. We meet Dr. Ages, “a mean-spirited, tight power-tripper who uses his money as a relationship tool” but can’t be bothered to flush his toilet. We meet Mrs. Krueger, who “mined the path of my cleaning day with yellow sticky notes. On a desk, ‘Polish this.’ On a mirror, ‘Clean this.’” The writer clearly wants us to hate this kind of behavior, yet she doesn’t deny her collusion in it. She finds selfish satisfaction in her ability to acquire such vivid material: “I think there are two things writers love more than anything else. One is solitude and the other is gossip. . . . If my clients were home the best I could hope for was that they would stay out of my way, and failing that, I hoped they had a good story to tell me.”

These good stories are the highlights of Peacock’s book...