When she leaves home in New York to go to college in Boston in the 1970s, Michele Kirsch - an anxious 19-year-old, with a growing valium dependency - starts taking on cleaning jobs to help make ends meet.
It gives her a taste of the life she thinks is in store: nice big house, teenagers' music blaring from their rooms, a crock pot sizzling away in the kitchen... And yet, when she finally does have something like that life, as a wife and mother in London, she is the one blaring music from her room, necking drink and drugs and making an almighty mess of her own home and family.
Cleaning other people's houses, eventually, is the only option left. At 50 years old, post rehab, living alone in a Hackney bedsit, Michele finds herself finishing her working life as she had begun, 'in a dumb job that you do when you can't really do anything else...'
This is a remarkable, powerful memoir in which cleaning and getting clean intertwine as a strange and ultimately magical form of redemption.
