At the end of the summer in 2017 I lost myself under a motherload of wifedom: organising separate new schools for my teenage daughters, my son’s holiday programme (bring extra shirt for tie-dye!), ferrying a depressed French exchange student to see the sights, arranging for recalcitrant tradesmen to patch up my old house, sorting out a relative’s hospital care, and hosting dear family at a time of great sadness. As I shopped for groceries, yet again, in the local mall, writing deadlines ticked. When the exit machine inhaled my ticket, I knew: something had sucked out my privileged, perimenopausal soul. I had to get her back.
There are doubtless more practical ways to handle a crisis, but I turned to George Orwell’s famous essay, Why I Write. “I knew,” Orwell says, “that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.” I would read him, I thought, to help me face some unpleasant facts about the division of labour in my household. In exploring the tyrannies, the “smelly little orthodoxies” of his time, I hoped to liberate myself from mine.
