HOME ECONOMICS

'Since I’ve had my first book published, I’ve earned more from cleaning than from writing. The home economics don’t add up.' 

HOME ECONOMICS is Caitríona Lally’s humorous, thought-provoking memoir of her time working in the housekeeping department at Trinity College Dublin while she awaits the publication of her first two novels in 2015 and 2021. Having cleaned part-time as a student, this return marks the beginning of a negotiation between the practical and creative demands of a writer’s life – an equation that is further complicated when she becomes pregnant.

At Trinity, Lally and her colleagues shout to one another through empty, ancient libraries, step around sleeping students and laugh at the cleaner-shaped blind spots in the thinking of feminist conference attendees. Lally finds humour in the gap between how the world views this famous university and how she experiences it during her workday while offering a powerful reflection on the work she chooses to do, and why; how we might perceive ourselves, and others; and whether our own personal home economics actually add up.

In her third book and first memoir, Lally writes in that space between the way the world sees the life of a writer and the reality of her own juggle with all the different, complex parts of her: writer, mother and partner, cleaner and runner, employee and colleague . . . success and failure.