Fifty Books Project 2023

Clean by Michele Kirsch

I want to get this clean right, because, while I cannot BE him, I still want to visit his flat weekly and make it nicer than it is already.  It is an easy gig and I always finish before the allotted time.  I love ironing his shirts with the special scented ironing water.  His toys seem to be in ascending order of year and popularity.  His Rough Guides are geographically ordered.  My trouble is this:  if you put things back in the exact right place, it looks as though you didn’t lift them to dust underneath.  Put the toys in slightly the wrong order and he will know you’ve moved them to clean underneath, but he will be annoyed if you put them back in the wrong place.

Michele Kirsch is roughly sixty years old and has spent most of the time since she was a teenager high on prescription drugs that she washed down with vodka.  Her reliance on Valium begins when her father dies and her mother falls apart, and continues through her anxious adolescence.  When she moves from Queens to Boston to, briefly, attend Boston University, she is high most of the days she spends cleaning houses to pay her bills.  After dropping out of college, she begins to build a career in music journalism – drinking and pills fit in with covering early 80s punk shows.  Despite her growing addiction and a general attitude of irresponsibility, she is successful, marries and has two children. 

Then she really begins to party, starting her days with vodka, blacking out from drinking on a regular basis, waking up on her living room floor most mornings.  She abandons her family to get high full time and struggles through a variety of rehab programs before getting sober and returning to cleaning houses for a living, visiting her children when they are willing to put up with her.

Kirsch recounts all this with honesty and an alarming sense of humor.  The book is told in alternating chapters, the chronology of her life interrupted by interchapters that describe the people she cleans for, their houses and possessions.  It is full of the kinds of crazy behavior one expects in the story of one who cares so little for sanity, and some of the anecdotes are entertaining – when she is working in the coat-check room of a punk club a man tries to check his passed-out girlfriend so he won’t miss the band, a musician she works for makes increasingly erratic requests (Get me 200 pencils!) that neither of them can remember the purpose of later, a music magazine's back issues are turned into furniture.  Kirsch is capable of making even sad or pathetic moments comic – she has to call the parents of a friend who has died and cannot bring herself to say the key words, repeating over and over that he couldn’t walk his dog that morning, somebody else had to walk it.  She also has a gift for capturing moments of tenderness – a boy on a bus reminds her of her son and she attempts to secretly straighten his collar.  

But there is a constant undertow of sadness in all this.  This is not the story of a fun, freewheeling rebel who went to far.  The cleaning chapters consistently show her comparing her life to the pathos and limitations of others, and coming up short.   Her addiction begins in depression and she struggles with anxiety and self esteem throughout.  Her husband and children are never really named and we see them slipping away from her life almost as soon as they are introduced.  The book is ultimately a redemption story – that is of course the subtext of the title, and her ability to handle honesty of this sort with such energy and humor is a kind of redemption.  But the sense of waste is never far from the reader and our happiness at her successful recovery is tinged with disappointment and frustration.