Pick up your socks!

As a child, I delighted in playing a game with my parents called “Bet You Wish You’d Had a Cat Instead.” Strewing the scattered heads of Barbies around the living room and unconcernedly sloshing grape juice all over my person, I’d trundle through the house, leaving my anal-retentive parents to bemoan the carnage their spawn had wrought. For me, perpetual domestic chaos has just always been a comfortable fact of life. But for the authors involved with Dirt: The Quirks, Habits and Passions of Keeping House, it is a multifaceted metaphor about family, gender and what it means to belong.

Mindy Lewis, Dirt’s editor, invites readers to relish the obstacle of housecleaning as a universal unifier, one which everyone must face (but not necessarily overcome) as a functioning adult. She begins her introduction by mentioning anthropologist Mary Douglas’ assertion of dirt as “matter out of place”: Stick a blender on the counter, for example, and it’s a purveyor of a delicious icy beverage. In the front yard, it’s fodder for a garage sale, and it’s dirt. By encouraging her authors to use their perspectives on domesticity to examine what it means to feel displaced on a more general level, Lewis hopes to achieve a community through diversity: the necessity of cleaning, she implies, transcends sex, age or class.

Unfortunately, most of the authors involved with Dirt seem to have taken things in a different direction. Although the vignettes are interesting at first, the joy of self-realization dims a bit after four consecutive “I bonded with my estranged mother through my eventual love for cleaning” confessionals, let alone 14. Most of the writers also persist in searching for psychoanalysis in every swipe of Swiffer: Does a clean house imply a clean mind, they ask, or simply a barely veiled obsession with control?

Despite touting itself as a compilation which works beyond gender barriers, Dirt includes only five male authors, none of whom write about the underlying ideology of housecleaning. Their stories involve the cleanliness of the workspace and the difficulty of maintaining organization under time constraints; while the female authors have obvious trouble with the connotations of household gender roles, the men have no such compunctions. The first three sections are basically without variance, as each writer explores women’s struggle with traditional femininity vs. the idea of the new “modern woman” in the context of housecleaning and domestic upkeep. The conflict is compelling; the resolution (invariably “You can vacuum and love your kids!”), not so much.

That said, when Dirt dares to deviate from this formula, the results are superb. Alissa Quart’s “Dirty Nostalgia” laments the loss of a dirtier, less gentrified New York City, longing for the camaraderie through grime which diminishes with the addition of every corner Starbucks. Similarly compelling is Mira Bartók’s “Spring Cleaning,” a heart-wrenching compilation of excerpts from the journal of the author’s homeless mother, who obsessively cleaned the spaces in which she found to stay.

These, along with most of the stories in the last section, come close to achieving Lewis’ original intent. Quart’s and Bartók’s protagonists are “people out of place” and therefore, by Douglas’ definition, “dirty”: By attempting to organize their surroundings, they create the sense of belonging which society denies them.

Albeit repetitive in parts, Dirt is worth a read, at the very least to encourage a closer contemplation of our own attitudes toward domesticity and cleanliness. Personally, I finished it with the overwhelming urge to purge my bedroom of all extraneous possessions—but I know I could never get rid of my expansive Barbie head collection.