Housework and Writing

Or why some women writers check into hotels to write

One of the advantages of my peripatetic life these days is that I don’t have a home to “keep.” Housekeeping is a lot less labor-intensive and time-consuming than it used to be. But it can still be a major distraction from the writing life, particularly for women, who still do the lion’s share of housework. (And I’m not even talking about parenting and the work it takes to hold a family together.)

Simone de Beauvoir on Domesticity

I was interested to read recently about how Simone de Beauvoir escaped the drudgery of most women’s lives by living in hotels for much of her adult life. She never had to clean or prepare her meals, eating at the local cafés and brasseries. Sartre often lived nearby, in the same hotel or a few blocks away in his mother’s apartment. When I was in Paris last month, I enjoyed walking from the latter near the Saint-Germain-des-Prés church to the Hotel la Louisiane where Beauvoir lived, imagining the two of them traversing those same narrow streets off the main boulevard, making their daily visits to each other.

Beauvoir eventually got tired of living in hotels and rented a (very small) apartment near Notre Dame for many years before finally buying her own studio, overlooking Montparnasse cemetery, where she and Sartre are buried together. Interestingly, her lover Claude Lanzmann lived with her for seven years, the only time she ever lived with a man. (She and Sartre always had different rooms in the same hotel.) I hope he helped with the housekeeping and cooking.

Here is what Beauvoir had to say in The Second Sex about domestic life for women:

Few tasks are more similar to the torment of Sisyphus than those of the housewife; day after day, one must wash dishes, dush furniture, mend clothes that will be dirty, dusty and torn again. The housewife wears herself out running on the spot; she does nothing; she only perpetuates the present; she never gains the sense that she is conquering a positive Good, but struggles indefinitely against Evil. It is a struggle that begins every day.

This is how I felt about keeping a house. We had about 2,000 square feet. It was an old, beautiful New Orleans shotgun with tall ceilings and rich wood floors. And it was constantly covered in dust and cat fur.

Then there is this passage in The Second Sex about a girl’s perception of the future “as an indefinite ascent” contrasted with her growing awareness of her mother’s endless labor, particularly in the kitchen:

Until death they will be subjected to these rites. Eat, sleep, clean . . . the years no longer reach toward the sky, they spread out identical and gray as a horizontal tablecloth; every day looks like the previous one; the present is eternal, useless, and hopeless.

For a woman’s labor there was the sole reward of love and family. Were they enough? Not always, surely. Beauvoir didn’t think so.

Simone de Beauvoir in her studio, rue Schoelcher 12 bis, March 1986. https://www.npr.org/2017/05/16/528503265/imagine-what-it-was-like-to-sit-down-at-simone-de-beauvoirs-desk

Getting Out of the House to Write

Women’s labor has been simplified considerably—thank God we’re not still washing our clothes by hand!—but the “second shift” is alive and well.

I realize now that selling my house and traveling was about more than Wanderlust. Freeing myself from the weight of my home had become necessary to my health happiness. If I was going to devote myself to writing, I needed to clear my brain and my life of the clutter and dirt that had accumulated in them.

I’ve read about both J. K. Rowling and Maya Angelou checking into hotels to write. (Seems Hemingway and Agatha Chrsitie did as well.) They couldn’t get work done at home and needed the simplicity of a clean, uncluttered space to allow them to focus. And perhaps the cleaning service! Although I do remember that Angelou instructed them not to clean in her room, so as not to disturb her papers.

Maya Angelou would check into hotels to write. Image from awritersden.wordpress.com.

Angelou like to lay on a bed and write longhand. She also said in an interview, “I’ve never slept there, I’m usually out of there by 2. And then I go home and I read what I’ve written that morning, and I try to edit then. Clean it up. And that’s how I write books!”

Of course, someone has to do the housecleaning, eventually. I’m aware that my own and other writers’ retreats from household labor has only made it someone else’s business, someone who may very likely be underpaid for their services (although the cleaning fees charged on Airbnb can be substantial).

I am also aware that such a life, for me, will not last forever. I long for another home, one that is all my own. The crumbs and the mold will still need to be cleaned away, but by keeping a small house of my own, the work will be much less onerous. And there are certain advantages for a writer who has her own space and her collection of books around her. Beauvoir certainly found so when she have gave up hotel life.

I’d love to hear what you think about keeping a home and domestic labor. I also wonder whether any of you leave home to write and why.

Until next time,

Anne

https://anneboydrioux.com/