You're Wrong About - The I Hate to Housekeep Book with Miranda Zickler

Episode Date: May 31, 2025

For many of us, house cleaning is a daunting, unpleasant affair, but for You’re Wrong About editor Miranda Zickler, it is a love language. Continuing the Peg Bracken Book Club tradition set forth by our I Hate Cookbook episode with Sarah Archer, we discuss The I Hate to Housekeep Book, a tongue-in-cheek guide for housewives that came out in 1962. Miranda also shares her background as a housecleaner as she and Sarah get into all the figurative cracks and crevices of the archetypal Home to figure out why keeping our space clean can feel so emotionally charged. More Miranda Zickler: linktr.ee/mirandatheswampmonsterSupport the show

You know, like if I keep putting stuff on my hands will I prove to myself that I love myself? And it's like maybe a bit but at a certain point could your hands get any softer? What if they just melt away? Welcome to you're Wrong About, the podcast where sometimes we just want to talk about housekeeping and the history of an allegedly normal but secretly extremely fascinating concept. And today we are talking about the I Hate to Housekeep book by Peg Bracken herself with Miranda Zickler herself. Hello.

Hello. Hello. Hello. I love it when you do that. Is that a crowd sound? Yeah. It's I think it's kind of, I'm also emulating Mike's mic because I think

I probably started doing that when I was watching Like his pretty little liars summary videos to maintain my own sanity I was just like Mike's Mike is gonna see me through this and he would like reveal something insane, you know He would be like meanwhile Myrna passes out at quiet practice It's like you're screaming but you can't actually have to whisper scream because your parents are asleep upstairs. Because you're watching Pretty Little Liars.

Yeah. And is it true that you've never actually watched Pretty Little Liars? Nope. Just the... But I loved the recap. If you watched the recap, you don't have to watch Pretty Little Liars. I'm like the grandpa in The Lost Boys. That's right. That's the secret. Well, Miranda, tell us about who you are. You edit the show and you make amazing music.

And when we do our massive science shows in collaboration with American Hysteria, you are the ghost of Stevie Nicks. I am the living ghost of Stevie Nicks. Yes. of Stevie Nicks. Yes, I am a longtime editor, first-time caller, and I worked for five years, five plus-ish years as a professional house cleaner, which makes me some kind of something appropriate for this episode. Someone who is right about some stuff. I'm right about some stuff, perhaps. Some stuff. No one's ever saying more than some stuff. I'm right about some stuff, perhaps. Some stuff.

No one's ever saying more than some stuff or else they wouldn't be on the show. That's right. And you also taught me to clean my house and also was like, you can just watch videos of like nice ladies and they can teach you how to clean your house. And you told me about Vanessa Amaro.

Oh, she is a nice lady. Yeah, I don't watch much clean talk. I don't watch much TikTok in general, but there were a few house cleaners on the internet that I did become interested in in my tenure as a house cleaner. And I would first like to say that house cleaning is a wonderful profession. And I loved doing it and I would still be doing it if I weren't so busy with so many podcasts to edit, which I also love. No, it's my favorite thing in the world.

But I think one of the things that made me skilled at editing podcasts was how many podcasts I listened to while I was cleaning other people's houses. So it all feeds into itself. Yeah, because podcasts are like such a big thing for jobs or hobbies where you have to spend long periods of time doing something kind of by yourself or not talking to anybody. Yeah, which is a beautiful way to do it and I was lucky enough to work for one of my favorite people. Her name is Allison Van Horn. And she really, she was the one who taught me how to clean. And my mother really tried, my parents both tried, but it just never really clicked for me until I had like a system. And that is one of the things I wanted to get into today because it's really very simple

once you have a system. I hated it. I, like Peg, hated to housekeep. Yeah, and we're talking about this book, which for people who haven't listened to it, a couple months ago I talked with Sarah Archer about the I Hate to Cook book, which is one of my favorite books, and this is another of my favorite. And I truly learned, like in the pie chart of like where I learned how to like, you know,

keep a house at least not infringing on my sanity. You and Peg Bracken have like equal sized slices. And I guess that's why it's so nice to put you in conversation with each other today. It's so nice. Yeah, I relistened to that episode that I did work on with Sarah Archer and the Is Your House Too Clean episode. And this is kind of a triplet sister episode to those two.

Yes, they're beautiful triplets like those scary dancer girls who did the solid potato salad number. And it's such an honor to be in league with Sarah Archer We are the potato triplets the potato girls. Yep, and all we need is a barn and we can make magic That's right my first question because we're talking about the I hate to housekeep book as a text and kind of getting into the history of housekeeping as a construct which is one of my Favorite things to throw grad school words at you know

Because it's like an aspect of gendered history that we live each day, really interestingly, among many other things. I feel like I'm like Stanley Tucci and the Devil Wears Prada being like, because it's art you can wear. And it's like, all right, I'm almost convinced. I mean, not really, but for a moment. Cerulean. But also, I just want to know, like what you think of the I Hate to Housekeep book as like advice and like if it's good and also sort of where it stops being of value to the modern person or where we would like it to stop being of value, but where it is in fact alarmingly relevant.

Mm hmm. Well, I mean, one of the things that also came up in the I Hate to Cook book, I mean, I guess the big thing is that it's really both these books are mostly about depression. Yep. Uh-huh. And how your husband won't do fucking anything, so don't bother trying. Which honestly, I kind of appreciate as advice because it's not the greatest advice, but given sort of the constraints of publishing

at this time, because Peg Bracken mentions in the like preface to this book that she and you know what I'm talking about? I do. Tell me, tell us. Childbirth pain. Yes, she tried to use the word pain to refer to childbirth and they changed it to discomfort. I mean, give me a freaking break. It's like how in I Love Lucy, they couldn't say she

was pregnant. She was expecting. Yes, of course. So Peg Bracken got divorced and my mom did not. And I feel like I grew up watching my mom trying to get my dad to do just like the tiniest things. Like there's an old Margaret show routine that's like, you know, being in a long-term relationship is like being a sex worker who works for really low rates. You're like, I'll lick your balls if you mow the lawn.

Or no, it's actually I'll lick your balls if you open this jar, which is a much lower exchange rate. The whole Peg Bracken thing is like, I like how bleak it is because in this book she's very, I have quotes in my notes that we can look at, but like overt in terms of being like, don't try to get your husband to do anything because he won't and you'll only cause strife. Trust me, husbands will not do a goddamn thing basically in much nicer language. And it's like, if you actually let your husband be as useless as he is and see it and believe it then maybe you'll get rid of him faster. So that's nice.

Or you just have to use the same attitude you're supposed to with dogs, which is just being calm and assertive. And rewarding behavior you like and ignoring behavior you don't like. And then if he's jumping all over you being like, I'm not petting you until you have all your limbs on the floor at once. And then making the meat out of a bowl on the floor. And I do think people have moved away from that mindset to some extent. My parents were very egalitarian in sort of the household.

And you know, I think that this book is very of its time. And which is the early 60s, which is the early 60s. The Mad Men times. Mm-hmm. The long, long ago. Mm-hmm. And I think that a lot of the cleaning tips are as such not super useful. I also love how she's really used the like Caroline Calloway method of like recycling things she's already published to bulk up the book.

She's just like, and here's a recipe because that's housekeeping too, right? She's like, look, why not? Why the heck not? It's efficiency. Yes. Yeah. Well, and would you like to maybe start us off by reading us some of this little preface here?

I would love to. Sixth Faucet Crest Printing, December 1967. Nice. And here's the foreword. Okay. For a number of long years, through no fault of my own, I have been shin deep in the business of giving advice on housewifery. Would you say housewifery?

I was saying housewifery in my head because it's midwifery, you know. Right. And it's more fun that way. Okay. This is a better name for it, I think, than homemaking, which is rather too pretty. Like nuisance abatement officer for dog catcher, house whiffery is more honest and more inclusive. House whiffery isn't among the seven lively arts, though it can certainly be regarded as the eighth. It is lively indeed in the same way sand hogging is. They both take courage, muscle and endurance. The main difference between a sand hog and a housewife

is that he has a nice clean tunnel later to show for his efforts and it stays put while she has it all to do over again the next day. She must simply keep tunneling. Go off Peg. What do you think of that line? I mean, that's like, once again, this brings me to the question, did Sylvia Plath have any Peg Bracken in the house? It feels like she did or they were like on a similar wavelength, right?

Yes. And maybe they got together for lunch. I would like to think so. I think you could write that play. Peg and Sylvia, Sylvia and Peg. Peg and Sylvia go that play. Peg and Sylvia, Sylvia and Peg. Peg and Sylvia go to lunch. Peg and Sylvia go to lunch. Yeah. But let me just say this again.

She must simply keep tunneling. Yeah, tell me your thoughts as a dramaturg and so on. You know, this book really makes a lot of the, I mean, she talks in the first chapter about there being three kinds of housekeepers and one is the, what is it? The spotless, the spotful, and the random. And yes, there it is. And this book is for the random. And I, myself,

actually really prefer to do a deep clean all at once, I usually really prefer to do a deep clean all at once, rather than always going about it as like, oh, I have to do a little bit every day. And you obviously do have to do a little bit every day. You have to keep things relatively clean, but like, I, you know, the whole clean talk thing of wiping down your counters with a sponge every night is really not for me.

Nice. I find that liberating. I kind of thought I had to do that. I thought I had to do it too. And my friends would get mad at me for the ways that I would like just sweep crumbs into my outturned palm and call that clean. House cleaner. That's what I'm saying.

But what I learned from being a house cleaner. That's what I'm saying. But what I learned from being a house cleaner is that if you just put everything on the floor, then you can vacuum it up. This is your big breakthrough, I feel like. A huge breakthrough. Yeah. Tell us about, do you have an, is there a name for this? I mean, trickle down cleaning. Trickle down cleaning trickle down cleaning economics left to right, top to bottom

is the way I like to do things. And I really changed everything for me because it's like so overwhelming to be a random housekeeper and just kind of do things as they come up as opposed to like, I'm going to dust the corners. I'm going to clean the walls. I'm going to clean the counters. I'm going to put it all on the floor. And then I'm gonna use my nice shark vacuum to clean it up.

And that's the other hill I'll die on. Yes. Is shark vacuum cleaners. They're like the Toyotas of cleaning products. This is a little pointed because you and Chelsea gave me a shark vacuum for my birthday and I have yet to really use it because I'm scared of vacuums.

That's completely fine. Because my mom used to vacuum so angrily. Oh yeah, well and there it is. There's so much emotion tied up in cleaning too. Yeah, I would suspect that a lot of women specifically, and I bet you probably have some anecdotal evidence of this just from like conversations you've had over the years and stuff that like a lot of women have associations

with deeply repressed female rage about housewifery based on our interactions with our female relatives. Absolutely, and Chelsea doesn't like to vacuum either. Chelsea is a broom guy, and I can't, I can't with a broom. I'm a broom guy. I will't, I can't with a broom. I'm a broom guy. I will get down on my hands and knees and clean the floor with a rag before I'll vacuum it.

And that is fair. And I would like to learn how to tolerate vacuuming the same way I'd like to learn how to tolerate a lot of things, but it's a process. It's less important than other things, other kinds of exposure therapy we maybe need to take part in, yeah.

Well, it is a bit embarrassing to be afraid of the vacuum. It makes you feel like a beagle. My grandma had an Australian shepherd growing up and you could just say the word vacuum and she would jump onto a couch. Yeah. It is your God-given right not to use a vacuum cleaner, Sarah Marshall.

Well, I still love it. You know, I still feel loved when I see it. And as long as you're not using a Dyson, I'm happy. I'm sorry to any Dyson loyalists. No, the Dyson has gotten really bad, I feel. Yeah. Well, and to talk about Peg for a second, she mentioned Sandhogs and Kelsey and I did a live show at SketchFest last year where I

talked about sandhogs a little bit because we were talking about alligators in the sewer and I got to talk about sandhogs, which in the 60s I think was a much better known term for basically guys who made tunnels and tunnels under bridges and you know, and I think I'll just like worked in caissons under the river and so we're dealing with a lot of like extreme workplace danger and workplace like incidents including being like shot up into the sky by pressurized water and stuff like that. I'm really glad you explained what a sandhog is because I just imagined a groundhog. I would I was picturing like a javelina when I first read this. What's a javelina?

Well, it's like a cute little pig that lives in the desert. Oh. Hold on, I'm going to like, let's look up javelinas just for fun. Sure. Javelina. Or Peckery, I guess. But yeah, aren't they cute?

Oh my God. Oh yeah, I know these guys. Yeah. Sarah, would you continue on with this cute? Oh my god. Oh yeah, I know these guys. Yeah. Sarah, would you continue on with this forward? Ooh, sure. So, to reiterate again my favorite line, she must simply keep tunneling. She is faced constantly with mute but persistent supplicants for attention. There are several choices.

Move it, clean it, shine it, brush it, wash it, or hide it. I have been doing all this by myself for about 20 years and I find it hard on the manicure. I've found too that none of the books about it does me much good. The household experts hand out cures that are worse than the ailment. They expect you to do things that depress you merely to think about, let alone do.

They think you'll actually keep an orderly file of all the washing instructions that come with the family clothes once you've been told to. The efficiently organized expert makes the mistake of assuming that you too want to be one. My own goals are more modest. I only want to make it around the clock, that's all. And I don't want to think about it too much either, because I'm thinking about something

else. If you're a bit nervous in the service anyway, and your mind is on raising the African violet or running an office or painting a picture. Reorganizing yourself into an efficient housewife is a giant step you're not about to take. You want an aspirin, not radical surgery. Mm-hmm. What do we think of that? I like it. And I also think what's emerging is that I like this book so much because I am a random housewife and that part of this is like housekeeping for the depressed and or ADHD brain where it's like, I know you don't want to do anything, but just like do it a little bit.

Yeah, absolutely. Here we go. So though I admit hastily and gratefully that many of the things in this book were discovered or invented by experts, even the experts slip up once in a while and recommend something you'd consider doing, just as many of them weren't. Indeed, some of the wean nuggets herein are ones that I mind all by myself. Also something I'll say about this little section is it does bring up clean talk, which I did watch.

I woke up at 4 a.m. this morning for no good reason, and I decided to watch some clean talk videos. Yeah, that's what I do at 4 in.m. this morning for no good reason, and I decided to watch some Clean Talk videos. Yeah, that's what I do at four in the morning. And preparation for this recording. And this whole thing about not needing to listen to what the experts tell you to do, I think is very important. It's a very important takeaway from this book

in so far as like, I mean, for one thing, the cleaning product industry is so huge now and it's like, we're being forced to buy all of these products. Has there been like noticeable change since you started working as a house cleaner? I think so. I think, you know, as our company, because Allison, who runs it, is so invested in these ideas, we use a cleaning solution that we make, which is literally dish soap and tea tree oil and water.

And we use it for everything. Miranda, let me tell you something. I based on that advice, got a giant Costco container of dish soap and have been using, as per the instructions, by the way, the actual instructions when you read them, a teaspoon diluted into a giant Sriracha container. It specifies that it needs to be a Sriracha container in the directions. It does. Yeah, actually.

I was very lucky that that worked out. And I believe that I might be able to use it for dishwashing for like a year and a half. For the rest of your life. Yeah, maybe. We'll see. You know, who the hell knows? Let's have, let's start a pool. I'm not implying that the rest of your life is a mess. We don't know. we don't know. We don't know, we can never know. And that's why we shouldn't spend too much time

thinking about our houses. And I like smells, but as you pointed out, you add a little bit of a sanctuary oil to the thing. I mean, another really sweet thing that I got really into doing in my house cleaning days was getting different scents for different seasons. So I would get some of that. I would use like a stronger soap, but then also use the Mrs. Myers, you know, like a geranium in the spring and pine in the winter. And I find that very satisfying

because I love a theme. I do love a theme. As I know you do too. Yeah, the rooms in my house are themed. And I would like to say that your house is one of my favorite places on earth. So good job with your house, Whiffery. My compliments to the housewife. Your house is one of my favorite places. Oh.

It's always been an inspiration to me. I was thinking about like the first time I was over, I was like, they have a little lamp in the bathroom that's a nice color and it's projected on the wall. It was the first time I'd seen a sunset lamp. Yeah, I just think we can really pare down what we use. We don't need to like fill our houses with bleach. Tell me about bleach because I'm scared of bleach.

So I really don't use it at all. I'm scared of bleach too. I don't use it at all. We had a kind of a policy against it unless the clients really wanted us to use it. We would just use our cleaning solution for everything and like some barkeepers friend sometimes but we kind of refused to use bleach unless it was something that the client really wanted because it's not good for you to fill a room with bleach. It doesn't feel like it's good good for you to fill a room with bleach. It doesn't feel like it's good.

Inhale it while you clean. No, and you know, I'm no chemist. Yeah, me neither. It doesn't feel good. No, that's the thing. If you're like, wow, this chemical feels bad, that might mean something. If you have a headache while you're doing it,

maybe it's not the thing. Well, and so you, and you listen to the Is Your House Too Clean episode where I basically make a very strong case for random housekeeping. So you're here to kind of you can make a rebuttal case for, you know, a more organized approach to that or a more like systematic approach. Because really, I think the answer is like, you know, something either works for you or it doesn't, you know.

Exactly. You can do it however it works for you. I don't remember, I've consumed a lot of cleaning and housekeeping material in the last couple of weeks, so it maybe was Peg that said, or maybe it was you that said that your house should work for you, not the other way around. I think Peg said that. And then I also said that because I had learned it from Peg and then kind of forgot about where I learned it from

and thought I had figured it out all by myself. So there you go. It's really good advice from Sarah Marshall and Peg Bracken. Well, let's go to the pit where Peg says this because I think this is pretty early on and she actually really just to be helpful puts it in block letters. Thanks Peg. I know I love her and this this like the I Hate to Cook book has beautiful illustrations

by Hilary Knight who did the the Eloise books. Eloise. So this is Peg advocating what I think now is kind of known as the five minute rule which is that if you see something and it will take five minutes or less to do, you should just do it now rather than adding it to the list of things you have to think about. To sum up, forget the old cliche to the effect that anything worth doing is worth doing well. This isn't true. When you're going at a high lope, a fast swipe at the sink is a lot better than no swipe at all. But back to the spotless housekeeper. The truth is, and you must remember this, you don't want to be one. even though you may have an occasional qualm as you watch the pile of unironed clothes rising like bread dough.

The question you must ask yourself at these times is this. Who, or whom, are you keeping house for? All caps. You want to read what follows here? Certainly not for your friends and neighbors. If their windows are shinier than yours are, it will make them feel all warm inside and they'll like you for it. You never heard a woman say, I simply adore Marcia. She's the most meticulous housekeeper.

Certainly not for your children. You don't keep house for them, but in spite of them. No, what you keep house for is for you and your husband, but mainly for you. Because if things get too cluttered, you won't be able to think straight and you never will get past record two in your conversational French course. And this is so true. Nous allons inventer une histoire. Je suis l'âge d'une fille. I'm the age of a girl.

And yeah, this is so true. And she talks about this in the preface too with the African violet. I think that it is like, you know, we've really stressed ourselves out about cleaning so much, but there is something so head clearing about clearing out your space and clearing out the garbage and the dust. And just picking up the evidence of the day you've had even. Yeah. And I think that's why I really like the big clean because it's like, and cleaning other people's houses, it's such a special love language to me.

Like one of my close friends' parents recently passed away and we cleaned, that was how I helped out was by helping to clean the apartment out. And it was really emotional and it was, you know, like this is the remnants of your past that you're clearing out of your space so that you can make new space and new life. And I think that that's a really special thing to help with and to have a skill set in and to be able to do for other people and also again, to do for yourself.

Cause it's just like, yeah, you're not cleaning for other people, you're cleaning so that you can enjoy your space and feel kind of clear headed about it, which I think is really nice. Yeah. I think we could, what if we could sell learning how to clean to the Manosphere type sensibility by being like, listen, do you want to be dependent on women for your whole life? Cause like, don't you want to like cut them off from the power they have over you

by being able to clean. We trick them. We can write like the pickup artist's guide to cleaning. And here, yeah, it goes on. Husbands, with a few grim exceptions, don't care much. They want a modest modicum of order. That's all. They'd rather not see how it got there either.

And they hate the whine of a vacuum cleaner only slightly less than the wail of a policeman's siren heard behind." I love that. Do we think this is true then or now? I mean, I guess we can't generalize about men. Well. All men are different. It's true. There are a lot of different types of men, but I do think that based on the sort of gender narrative that has been handed down for a few generations here and which is surprisingly upheld and sort of anecdotally a lot of cases

that I've observed that like that dynamic is alive of men being like having a certain and like relatively low standard for how the house needs to be. And women, I think more identifying with the house. Cause men also famous, there's like, maybe you've encountered this on TikTok, the thing of like a woman's touch versus a man's touch and like decorating an interior design where it plays like this one, like theme of like the black swan coming out.

So like it cuts to like a gaming setup and it's like, because like I used to be, I mean, my apartment in Madison, I mean, it was actually very easy to keep clean because I had a mattress and a box spring, which I gave to friends when I left who they immediately were like, we got bed bugs from the mattress you gave me. And I was like, am I immune to bed bugs? Am I unbreakable? Because I never had bed bugs. Actually, I am. Yeah, that is a thing. When I lived in New York, I was the only person on the lease of a five bedroom apartment. And I was not allergic to bed bugs. So when we got bed bugs, they didn't affect me. And yet I was still on the hook.

Oh no. To pay for the heat guys who came and destroyed the bed bugs. Well, I mean, I guess the answer is that I'm just, I'm a street rat who can't feel bed bugs anymore. So. Same, we are together, both of us street rats. Oh well, I'm happy with that. I love to be a street rat with you.

So wear a purple vest with nothing underneath. Because I had my street rat mattress and then I just had a love seat from IKEA that I had inherited from another grad student and I had also gotten the mattress from another grad student who was leaving. And then I just had stacks of boxes that I used as end tables and as my desk. And I didn't have a kitchen table. I just had like a box that I use as a coffee table and a box that I use as an end table. And I look back on it now. And like I had bought, I got like plastic silverware when I got to town. And then I was like, I don't know, what if I just keep using this plastic silverware for the whole year? And I did. And it's like,

boy, I could have done, I could have made it big on under consumption TikTok had that existed 10 years ago. But did it work for you? It did work for me. I really loved it. I was very happy that year. And I also really liked the stuff I have now. I love my house. I love my couch that I'm sitting on. I love my throw pillow of Totoro that I'm looking at right now. But it's like in a culture where for a few decades now, the consolation prize for the government screwing the American working class and just like manufacturing in general by moving all of that overseas is like, well, we took all your jobs, but you can buy stuff at rock bottom low prices.

And now they're taking away the stuff. And so our relationship with stuff as Americans is like unbelievably fraught. And I feel like it's natural to have as people coming into adulthood during the last few decades and certainly now like a sort of maybe emotionally complex relationship with like how much stuff do you want to have? And during that year, it was like imperative to me to be tied down by nothing. Like I remember I got it. I brought home a chair, just like a wooden chair, not even a heavy chair from Goodwill and brought it home, or actually in St. Vincent de Paul, and then just maneuvered it upstairs and then I was like, I feel trapped.

Yeah, we are so pressured to both over and under consume. Yeah, simultaneously. Why the fuck not? And buying things in order to under consume, which is a very strange phenomenon. Right. Or like, you know, like 10 years ago we were in the full throws of like the zero waste aesthetic. And it was like, now to go zero waste, you have to buy a whole bunch of shit, obviously.

Exactly. Exactly. Well, and was that feeling for you, did that have to do with being able to leave at any time? Yeah. Or what do with being able to leave at any time? Yeah. Or what do you think that feeling was? Yeah. Yeah. And just also like not having anything to maintain, you know, to get to the house with free aspect of it where it was like I didn't like I had, you know, like one set of sheets.

I had like one or two towels. I had like two plates or something. It was ridiculous. You know, I look back on it now and it was like, I remember having friends over and they were like, Oh, Sarah doesn't have chairs really. And so the next time they came over, they brought like tailgating chairs with them. Well, there you go. Then it works. It does work. It's community, which actually is an element of pick rack and that I want to talk about because there's a big emphasis and part of it on like, ask your butcher, ask your baker,

ask your neighbor, talk to people about stuff. And it's like, Peg, in America today, your neighbors will shoot you on sight. Your butcher plays scary classical music, so nobody spends the night outside their doors. It's very difficult to follow that advice in this economy of socialization. Well, and just talking about this book and how it feels like it has aged, I don't know, what are your thoughts? And we can kind of go anywhere with this in terms of the different chapters and the things that they're about. Or, you know, if you want to be more left, right, top to bottom,

we could do it more that way. But what is like maybe some good advice and some bad advice in this for you? I mean, my favorite piece of not necessarily bad advice, but extremely of its time advice is she's like, you can't get your husband to do chores, but you can't get your children to do chores. Think of all the things a five-year-old can do and one of them is empty ashtrays. Oh, she does have a really great tangent about ashtrays and how you shouldn't have big or nice ones. It should just be an ashtray, which is fine advice. Let me tell you, my dad had a big, nice nice act right and it does certainly create a certain ambiance You know if somebody feels like they don't have to throw it out that often. Yeah, she also has this um

The useful box which is kind of fun And it's just like get a bunch of cigar boxes because your husband inevitably smokes cigars Yes, and then put things that you might need in them Get a bunch of cigar boxes because your husband inevitably smokes cigars. And then put things that you might need in them. She has a little list and I love a little list. Should we hear the little list? The little list says, equip each one with a pair of cheap scissors, parentheticals. If they were good ones, someone would take them elsewhere for other purposes.

That's true. A roll of cellophane tape, a pencil and a ballpoint pen, a small notepad, spools of white, black and beige thread, each with a needle, and a nail file. And then you just put one in each room or as many rooms as you have cigar boxes, and then you just have these things. It's like, I guess, like a junk drawer that's everywhere. I love that. Oh, here's the ashtray section. It says, an ashtray should resemble an ashtray, middle-sized and equipped with grooves or slots. Never use the dainty China chicken bone kind of dish, which extinguishes your cigarette the minute

you let go. Never use the huge, foolish birdbath type either. When four or five people are busy using it, it soon has all the allure of the city dump and you must empty all 14 pounds of it quite as often as the little ones. That's very true. As for the objet d'art, Ashtray, any decent guest would sooner use his trouser cuff

than stub out a cigarette in a pale porcelain upturned palm." She's so funny. I know. I love this book. Yeah. I think the writing is so good and there are so many, I've been reading, as you know, Blythe Spirit and there are so many great, just like two word phrases that I've underlined and been like, that's so great, you know? And also in Peg Bracken, there are so many great, just like two word phrases that I've underlined and been like, that's so great.

And also in Peg Bracken, there are so many phrases like. Like you might at one point have a rug and a puppy. Yes. Both of which you like. Yes. Something like that. Is that really what you were gonna say? No, but I love that one too.

And that is something I think of when I think of how much I love this writing. But the one about like basically the uselessness of husbands and how isn't it interesting how they're perfectly able to wash their own drip dry shirts when they're on a business trip, but then when they come home, they become all helpless and fluttery at the sight of one. Helpless and fluttery. Do you think that she had any kind of like ghost writing help?

I think she was in it for the writing, you know, because she was in advertising, you know, as her like day job. And so I feel like that is where you would learn how to use language really efficiently like this. Yeah. Will you tell me a little bit about Peg Bracken's biography? Because I don't think we've gotten into that in any of the other Triplet episodes. We might have gotten into it a bit in the first one.

I can't remember, but she lived in Southwest Portland. Yeah, just that she was in Portland. Yeah. Yeah, she had a first marriage, then ended a divorce. She worked in advertising and her partner for a while was Homer Groening, the father of Matt Groening. Right. Yes.

And, you know, just that these books were hugely, hugely successful. You know what we should do? What you wanna do a newspapers.com search. Let's see if we can find something in real time folks. Okay, what should we, are we diving on Peg Bracken? Yeah, I think just Peg Bracken and see maybe what comes up from the 50s or the 60s, cause she would have been getting her feet wet,

in like the late 50s. Okay, the first thing that comes up is from Victoria, British Columbia in 1958. And it says, Monty Roberts, writing in the current issue of the Saturday Evening Post, a housewife named Peg Bracken takes an extremely dim view of housewives. Oh no, we're reading a negative review. Should I go on? Yeah, go on. I'm intrigued. Okay. She says as far as her own operations as a housewife are concerned, her husband ought to fire her. Mrs. Bracken believes that housewives do not earn their way and without saying it in so many words, implies that the average housewife is not worth the powder to take the shine off her nose.

Oh my god. What if we deserve to not try very hard? You ever think about that, Monty? Montregard? Monty Montregard Roberts, you idiot. Okay, with many of Mrs. Bracken's statements, which I will not repeat here. Oh my god, too inflammatory for Victoria. But by and large, I must arise to the defense of the housewife.

Oh, good for you. Not that I have ever been a housewife, that's right, Monty, but on certain emergent occasions I have functioned as a house husband. Interesting, okay. You know, husband means historically comes from the word house and the word bond are the roots of suck. So he's saying he's a house house bond. That idiot. It's like saying ATM machine. You idiot. So this part is in bold. Oh, the reason is nothing more nor less than plain stark unvarnished frustration. Okay, I'm confused about what he's saying.

This would have been, I guess, pre the I Hate to Housekeep book. I think maybe she published something in the Saturday Evening Post that he's reacting to that's like some of the material that maybe ended up making it into these books that she published. Right. I just don't, I wouldn't characterize her as someone who's criticizing housewives, but maybe at this point she was in the 50s. And maybe that kind of evened out to what we have

in the I Hate to Housekeep book, which is more of unity. Well, okay, let's find out. So what year is this, 58, you said? All right, found it on the first Google, let's find out. So what year is this? 58, you said? All right. Found it on the first Google. Just remarkable. Amazing. Let's see. So this is from the Saturday Evening Post archives. Here, for example, is Peg Bracken in 1958 telling readers, my husband not to fire me for not being a cost-effective source of domestic help. And then Peg has written, if you were at all attuned to the times, you know that a housewife isn't a housewife anymore. She's a versatile expert,

a skilled professional business manager, practical nurse, house cleaner, child psychologist, home decorator, chauffeur, laundress, cook, hostess, all this besides being a gay, well-groomed companion. And she is therefore worth at prevailing wage rates about $20,000 a year, or anyway, a lot more than her husband. A lot of recent literature has tried to establish this point.

Some of it is written by men, and I can't decide whether they are chivalrous or just cowed. But that quiet tittering you hear in the back row comes from the women who know different. Housewife, homemaker, it's still spinach. Women are honest about the important things. This is one of their many lovable qualities. Well, it is fun to be checked under the chin, but reaction sets in the minute we housewives – and I think I'll just continue to use that dirty old word – the minute we housewives

really look ourselves in the eye, practically any housewife who totts up, as I have just totted up, what she'd be worth in today's labor market is apt to find herself in a nervous condition bordering on the shakes. From my own computations, one salient fact emerges loud and clear. All my household skills together wouldn't earn enough to maintain one small sized guppy. In a word, nobody would have me except a husband. What is more, I'd call this a fairly general state of affairs. Hmm. Yeah, I don't love that. Yeah. I think she changed her tune over time. Yeah. And I think Monty is siding with the housewives. So I guess that's fine.

Well, she's like kind of toeing the line by being self-deprecating. Right. But given that the idea of paid, you know, domesticity became part of at least the conversations within women's lib. Mm-hmm. You know, it's like, well, wait a minute. What about the hands across the pantry peg? Yeah, exactly. And also what is she working through about herself by saying that? Because even if you're doing it in like a less systematic,

less sort of home economics story kind of a way, it's like you're still, you know, the labor that you're doing and the kinds of labor that you're doing are possible to calculate in terms of how you would be paid if someone was paying you, which they don't have to just because of how, you know, history has worked out and in whose favor. But also just in terms of how you aid in the production of capital in a more sort of calculable way, maybe. Right. Because the idea is that you're either also working yourself or you're supporting your husband in his capital production. Right. And also like the statistically significant number of housewives who have also worked,

you know, like there was never a time when all women were at home. Mm hmm. Like women have always had to work. Mm hmm. So yeah, we got some skeletons in her closet. She does. Yeah. I mean, and you know, we've all got them. Yeah. And also it's like it's part of any writers kind of gestation to write wrong things that they then come to disagree with, which is perhaps what happened here. Absolutely. He's also written here. The blunt fact is most housewives are pretty good at a couple of things, fair to middling and a couple of others, and as for the rest, they do them when and if they have to. And lousily. A man never knows which one or two housewife-ly talents he's getting when he marries, either.

No matter what good fudge she made in her bachelor girl apartment, he can't be sure. That is one of the things that makes marriage so exciting. Let's face it, we housewives are jugglers who trying to keep a dozen nice, big, fresh eggs in the air, spend most of our times getting in the shells. Once in a blue moon, for the fast wink of an eye, all the eggs stay up. So I feel like it's like there's also a cry for help in there, but it's like a cry for help that comes in the cost of taking down other women. Right. And it is interesting that we have here.

I'm sorry, Monty. I spoke too soon. Yes, me too. That's what I was going to say is like we have this rebuttal from Monty. So that's nice. One point for men. Does Monty say anything else that you like? He sort of ends the bulk of it by saying, the housewife does her best to teach the children their ABCs, but by the time she gets around to the bees, the kids are convinced she's strictly for the birds.

Take even the simple everyday automatic matter of making the beds. What happens to beds when they are made? Somebody goes and sleeps in them. That's what happens. And the made beds are immediately unmade. And so she tunnels on. He didn't

say that, but I'm editorializing because it does almost seem like maybe she was inspired by this bad review of her own article. Because Monty does appear to be saying the same thing that she ended up coming around to, which is that housewives are not overpaid because they have to be literally constantly working in order to tunnel on. Yeah, so they're constantly in golden time, actually. And also in the Saturday Evening Post kind of archives blog post, it finishes with this piece of Peg Bracken biography. The I Hate to Cook book changed Peg Bracken's life by

making her a celebrity. It produced another unexpected change when she showed the manuscript to her husband for his opinion. It stinks, he said. She decided then that she ought to fire her husband. They were soon divorced. Wow. Yeah, I mean, that's as good a reason as any to leave your husband, I guess. I agree. If he thinks your life's work stinks Dump him. I mean, yeah, and it's sometimes it's nice to get a clear-cut piece of evidence which also makes the Husbands being useless stuff in her subsequent book feel just a tiny bit more pointed

We also have it we have a PDF of this article. Let me send it to you because we have pictures of Peg in here actually. Oh great Oh, I would I have just just occurred to me that I haven't seen peg I only have this picture on the front which is how I've imagined her right this illustration Okay, I see peg with a Okay, I see Peg with a vacuum wrapped fully around her body while her children play with a telephone and a boot. And I guess that's her husband who she fired? Yep. Roderick Low. Come on. That's not a name. Uh, I see an ad for... What the hell is that? Oh, it's an ad for remote control. An early remote control, maybe. Um, yeah, you can't see Peg's face in either of these pictures. She's the faceless

housewife. Yeah, that's true, huh? A housewife frankly estimates her true market value as a domestic necessity. Her conclusion? My husband ought to fire me." Interesting, Peg. Wow. But then she fired him, so it all worked out. Oh my god. I also feel like this is the kind of thing that you might write, you know, and not to like overly defend or engage in special pleading for Peg Bracken. But a lot of magazine pieces are written not because people deeply believe what they are saying, but because they like need a car payment or something. Very true. Yes. Which is not to defend, you know, the player so much as to hate the game or to recognize

the game for what it is, which is a game. Which is a game. Let me, I have something to read on page 22 that we can read just here a little bit. Okay. So we have the first section of this book is the bride zone ABCs. Which is very fun. We've got A is for alphabet, B is for burn ointment, C is for code. And there are a lot of sentences in this book. Again, I know a lady.

Again the community. I love it. And in this case we have, you must fix upon one sure permanent place at home for leaving messages on a bulletin board or a mantle or under one particular clock. I know a wife who decided she was tired of both housekeeping and husband and determined to leave them. She left a letter somewhere, but he didn't find it. When she came back the next day to pick up a few things, he was understandably puzzled. And so was she, because she couldn't remember for the life of her where she'd put

it. They became so engrossed in looking for the letter, that they got quite friendly again, and they're still married. So you see what can happen." So the idea there is that if you don't have a permanent place for your messages, then if you break up with your husband, he just won't know it. Yeah. What if your breakup might not take? So you'd better make sure he gets your letters. Right.

I don't think that story's true. Oh my God. Oh my God, Peg. What an imagination. Yeah, I think it's really cute that chapter two is just the alphabet. It's like, okay, we need some methodology here for talking about housewifery.

And I guess we'll use the alphabet. Well, speaking of that, this reminds me that when I realized this book had an index, I was like, oh, we should read the index. Ooh. If you're writing a book, I hope you consider having an index and let me, I'll read some and maybe you can take over if you want. Okay. Great. Okay. Accident policies, add a pound cake, adventurous eggs, alligator leather, care of alphabet uses for aluminum brightening bacon with eggs, bacon grease disposal disposal baking soda as polisher basic beef

Basic cleansers bathroom hints bathtub brings beans kidney with bacon with cheese cranberry jelly Hammond fruit meatballs. These are all under beans Ministeroni beanie stroney beanerino's brandy brass bread breakfast Bride's own ABC If you were looking for. Bride Zone ABCs is next in the index. If you were looking for the Bride Zone ABCs, there they are. Do you want to continue?

Sure. This is poetry. This is poetry. Bulletin board, substitute for, we just read about that sort of burn ointment, calories, how expended, camouflage, personal. What is that? Great question. Let's see, page 138. Oh, well, this is the beauty section of the book, which is very interesting. Yes. What do we think about that? I was thinking about how this relates to sort of the clean girl aesthetic and how we have historically related hygiene to beauty and like hygiene to moral purity and therefore beauty and how that was sort

of a thing and like it you know during the first big advertising boom and how it was like oh yeah you've got to be clean. Hair soap and stuff. In order to be beautiful. Yeah, exactly. What do we think of that part of this? And I guess that relates back to how the woman identifies with the house. Your face is part of the house. Yeah.

Well, here's something she writes that I also as a random housekeeper identify with. I've noticed something else. If you conscientiously prepare and apply your face as the beauty people tell you to do, and I have tried this, you spend 900% more time at it than usual, but you look only 6% better. This seems to me to be a poor return on the investment. Yeah, I feel like it kind of cuts both ways, you know, because that idea of like the clean curl aesthetic is that you shouldn't need makeup. And it's like, everybody needs makeup to do certain

things. But do you need it around the house? That's like, then it's up to you. It's whether you want it or not, you know, or whether you have needs that you're meeting that way in your day to day kind of around the house life. But I do really also see and there is, I mean, speaking of clean talk, some material in this book, she's got the rock bottom eight, which are like the eight cleaning products that you can do basically everything with. And one of the things that she articulates that is like very real today and it feels like it's coming back in as an issue in a bigger way because of just inflation and how expensive everything is and is getting,

seemingly expensive or although it hard to predict ways that like there is this kind of lifestyle creep of cleanliness and the beauty industry where, you know, the marketplace will be like, buy this mattress freshening spray for 89 cents. And then you're like, well, I never thought about my mattress before, but now that it's being marketed to me, maybe my mattress is not so fresh, if you know what I mean. Right.

And it also goes back to consumption for the sake of under consumption and being sold this idea that you shouldn't need makeup. So you need to spend all of this money on skincare products so that you shouldn't need makeup, so you need to spend all of this money on skincare products so that you don't need makeup, or you need this special makeup that makes it look like you're not wearing makeup. And this whole idea of selling you under consumption. Well, and also I guess that it makes me think of,

and I don't know how relevant this is because every other experiment that we use as an allegory for stuff, it was like non-repeated and sort of like a better story than scientific results, I think. But the scientists who did the weird mouse utopia experiment in the 60s where these mice had like an infinite supply of food and resources. And so they just like bred to the point of overpopulation and then forgot how to breed with each other. And apparently some of them just became obsessed with grooming themselves. Wow.

And it's like, we're the mice, we're doing it. We are. You know, and part of the apathy came allegedly from the fact that all of the social roles were full. Oh, so we need fewer people filling social roles? Explain to me what we do with this mouse utopia. Well, I mean, I don't know, because like a lot of 60s science, it's like,

well, what are we, I feel like it was presented as an argument for like avoiding population growth, which is of course an argument that can, you know, practically is sort of like throwing the ball over to like white supremacy and eugenicism, just based on, you know, the way people historically interpret it and try to politicize it. But I feel like maybe part of what we have the urge to do is like, we can recognize like, cause we, you know,

I think a lot about overconsumption is represented on social media and that we're kind of in, we've seen sort of the moment of the morning shed routine, you know, where like, and the idea is like, I just slept with so much uncomfortable stuff on my face. And now I'm taking it off because beauty is pain and like, and I can see like the appeal of like treating your body as if it's like a Renaissance painting that you're restoring. Like it's kind of like, you know, sometimes it's like, we just do stuff because we want to feel something. And as long as we can do it in a way that we can afford, I think that's fine.

But I think that there's also maybe an element there of like, you know, maybe we're just obsessed with cleaning ourselves over and over again because things are really scary right now. But maybe we just couldn't maybe we just couldn't get any cleaner. Maybe we're as clean as we're ever gonna get. That's a great point, yes. And like before germ theory, we thought that we got sick from demons.

So it's... So you know, and some people think that's still... That feels related. Yeah. And I think they're trying to pass a bill that you can teach that in school somewhere in America. I mean, I made that up, but it could be. It could be. I would believe you.

That is an interesting thing that Clean Talk has sort of done is make the unseen more seen, you know? Like everybody got really into it for a while where it used to be, you know, something that you did very privately and kept away from, you know, your husband or your friends or whatever. And you just wanted to create the illusion

that your house was always clean and you hire a housekeeper to come in and, you know, you keep that part separate. And then the clean talk thing for all of its flaws And you hire a housekeeper to come in and you know, you keep that part separate. And then the clean talk thing for all of its flaws did kind of make everybody excited about it and like talking about it. Yeah. And talking about the invisible hours, you know, where a house, according to everyone

else just sort of magically cleans itself. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, housekeeping is one of those jobs that is sort of stigmatized and, you know, like the unskilled labor problem and quote unquote unskilled labor and people like Vanessa Amaro who we were talking about really took some wind out of those sails and made it a fun sort of shiny project that we could all relate to rather than making it a traumatizing experience to learn about cleaning. Yeah, because it does feel like I remember growing up, you know just from when we all observed different things but it was my mom was sort of clean and a frenzy before there were people coming over and it was with You know like famously the I think probably the all-time biggest Chris Fleming video

Company is coming. Mm-hmm. Yeah, one of my favorites what it which I yeah I loved that video long before you ever showed me the magic that is Gail Yeah via Chris Fleming and you know if you want to see 40 episodes of that of companies coming, his main character going on a whole emotional arc, you know, that you have Gail waiting for you. But just the thing of like, you know, everybody throw out your beds. Throw out the chairs. People can't know we sit. Put them in the cubbies.

I need no evidence of life in this house, you know, and like that is to a certain type of person, you know, I mean, many types of people, but certainly like millennial women who I know, like there is something so cathartic about that video and that character because it's like, that's what the message always was. Like there can't be any evidence of life in this house. We have to stage it like it's on a home hunting show. Right. And that really set a lot of people up for failure in terms of ever wanting to clean

their own home for their own sake. Right. It became this really scary thing, not from Gale, but from people. Yeah, it's not Gale's fault. Gale's inspirations. And it doesn't have to be that way. Well, and what was it like for you to then learn your systems and how did that change the way you inhabit your own home?

Tell us about the system. I have my little cleaning bag and I have a scrub daddy, which I will name by brand. I mean, yeah, I believe in scrub daddy too. I believe in scrub daddy and microfiber towels. And you just carry around your garbage bag and your cleaning bag and you do room to room, top to bottom, left to right. What about clutter? And I realize this is more of a personal question than a professional

question, but you know. Clutter is much harder for me because my brain really wants to just streamline the system and not think. I think that's the goal when dealing with clutter, probably. Totally, yeah. And a home for every item and every item has its home. And I've never been, that's a skill I have yet to master, but. I don't know if everything ever truly has its home. And I've never been, that's a skill I have yet to master. I don't know if everything ever truly has a home, but you can try to approach that. Everything deserves a little home. Everything at least maybe at some point will have a basket.

Right, because when you're looking for something and you're like, I know I put this somewhere because I knew it was important, you have a basket for that. That's really good. What do you have in your house that you like? Like as kind of, just a important, you have a basket for that. That's really good. What do you have in your house that you like? Like as kind of, you know, just a way that you have it set up where you're like, these meet my needs.

Oh, I have always had like an old clothes chair. Maybe you grew up with this too. Like in my room, I would just have a chair where I would throw clothes that I had already worn, but didn't wanna wash yet. I don't have so much of a system for that, but now that you've said it, I'm like, yeah, I think probably, yeah. It just got, you know, yeah, it just got piled up on a chair when I was growing up

and all through my twenties. And now I have just some bins where I like some like nice fabric bins in my room where I put like, here are sweatshirts that I'm going to wear again and I need pretty regularly. But I don't have a specific drawer for them. I don't want to like put them away so I can just shove them them in this basket and then I have the pants in the next one. And I have all of my important undergarments, as Peg would refer to them, in another bin. And so everything is just there. And I can rather than using a chair and just throwing everything on top of that till it's just a pile, I organize just very vaguely into these nice fabric clothing bins.

Because I feel like the goal for me and kind of based on peg theory is to like have it feel like your house is working for you because you've set up systems that then are not that difficult to maintain. You know, whether you do the deep clean method, which like I, you know, I like to like go to town on the house on certain days too. Although it's just like, I can't rely on myself to be as thorough and I do more the thing of like doing something that reminds you of something. It's like if you give them a moose a muffin and I'm the moose, you know?

Right. And like that was something that came with a lot of practice from just cleaning other people's houses. And this is, this comes back to the clutter thing is like, I don't want to, I'm not putting away other people's clutter because I don't know where it goes. Right. So I'm just doing the clean. And so this is to the question that I have seen asked on the internet. Should I clean my house before my house cleaner comes over? It depends on how clean you want your house because I'm not going to put away your clutter, but I am going to do a great job cleaning what was underneath the clutter. What if a person got a laundry hamper, which clearly I believe can solve all of life's problems and just put all the stuff that they want, the surfaces that they're on or like,

all the stuff that could get in the way of cleaning, just like put it in a hamper and put the hamper somewhere out of the way. Could that work? Put it in a hamper. That's the tagline. Put them in the cubbies. Put them in the cubbies. Yeah.

And I find that I have a similar thing with my own clutter is like when I'm cleaning, I want to just turn my brain off and clean and I don't want to think about where things go. So that's, that's my struggle. I really like the linear path of the deep clean. That's the appeal of it, I think. And I think probably I like decluttering much more than I like cleaning because that is like a little mystery that you get to solve of like, what is

this? Where does it want to be? Who are its friends? You know, like what kind of a such a good detective? Sometimes the case will take me years, but but it's just because I'm so thorough. I also like how there's a significant, I think, component of this book that's like, whatever, you can't do it anyway, so don't bother trying, which for a lot of stuff is good advice. I think there's also an element of talking about the spotless housekeeper as someone who creates their own problems in order to solve them.

And so one of the things she recommends is getting an automatic dishwasher, as we call them at the time, because, and of course, it's a debate that rages on incredibly. The spotless housekeeper will say that it takes just as long to use a dishwasher because you have to pre-rinse everything first. And Peg Bracken is like, well, yeah, it takes you just as long. But

there are a lot of people who will just put the plates in after they've scraped off. I think she says anything large like a turkey carcass. And then, you know, if there's like to quote the movie singles, a big little globby problem, then like you deal with that as it arises, but it's still going to be like a glob on one plate rather than having to wash all the plates. It's true. Is her argument. And you know, automatic dishwashers have come pretty far in the past 60 years.

Yeah, absolutely. What is an organizational system in your house that you really like? Now I'm really curious about it because you have lots of yeah nice little organizational systems that I admire Yeah, really like it's like scritches my brain behind its little ear I have pegboard in my kitchen which is inspired by Julie a child pegboard All the so many all the pegs and I have a bunch of hooks Just on my walls in my kitchen where I keep my most used utensils. So I just like they're there where I can see them and I know where to put them back. So

like I know where my my little like spatula goes. I also love speaking of the early 60s like the metal grip it and rip it like ice cube trays, which you can find at estate sales as well as antique stores and stuff. But if you're worried about microplastics, I don't really know if we can actually meaningfully control how many of them are entering our bodies. But you know, they're fun ice cube trays. They make a cool sound when you pull the thing and then you dump all the ice out. That's not a system. I guess like those ice cube trays. It's technically an ice cube organizational system. So we're on topic.

Yeah. Oh, and I built out of cardboard, one of those shirt folding things. Oh my God. And this is a thing that I think I learned through the trickle down effect of learning it from YouTubers who learned it from Atomic Habits, which everyone who runs a girly pop fitness channel seems to have read.

But the thing of like make habits attractive, easy and obvious, right? So like, because I have my shirt folding thing, I like to, and this is actually something Peg says is a myth where it's like, you'll never learn to enjoy ironing. Sure some insane women say that they like to put on a cute fit and do a bunch of ironing all at once, but they're crazy. And like, I think you what it comes down to is that and again, she also says this there's and it's she'll often say something quite deep and like a prosaic little section, but there's somewhere I forgot what section but she's like now on the matter of canning

only do it if you think it's great fun, you know? Like maybe you'll save a little money, but like probably not. It's really just about like, do you enjoy it? Cause like you just do it cause you enjoy it, but like you don't have to do it. I have the kind of mind, the kind of beautiful mind, if you will, where I really get a vast amount of pleasure from like letting all my t-shirts pile up and then folding them with a cardboard shirt folding thing and pretending I work at the Gap in 1991. And it's so satisfying. And it's to me the sort of lesson there is like if you have to do something anyway, and you probably you don't actually have to fold shirts, you can just jam them all in there, you know, or you just like put them on hangers or something. Or something.

If you have to do something anyway, you might as well figure out if there's like a relatively simple and cheap way to do it a way for you to do it where you like enjoy it somehow where it like lets down the dopamine. And I think that like the thing about a lot of chores is that you are able to if you're able to uncouple them from like maternal memories of maternal rage and like inherited like feminized trauma, which is a work in progress for everybody probably. A lot of them are like quite fun, you know,

but it's like you have to make them fun for yourself. But like, I think one of the things I've come to believe is that like our relationships with our houses deserve to be more fun and to serve us in better ways and also for us to be more in the spirit of like, wow, it's so cool that I have this house that offers me shelter from the elements, you know, or an apartment or, you know, a corner of a basement or whatever. And the maintenance that I do on it is, you know, much like the

maintenance I do on my body, which again, it's like we all pretty much have a fraught relationship with this. And it makes sense to overcorrect into overconsumption because it's we're like, is this love? You know, like if I keep putting stuff on my hands, will I prove to myself that I love myself? And it's like, maybe a bit. But at a certain point, could your hands get any softer? Exactly. What if they just melt away? There's a 6% return here, as Peg says.

Right. Exactly. But this thing of like, that I think often like those efforts we make are like we are trying to like heal the relationship between like our soul and our body and our self and our house, which is ultimately maybe the same thing. It's like the thing that the spirit resides in and that gets hard water stains on it. Yeah, it's our little crab shell, yeah. Yeah, it's our crab shell. Hermit crab shell.

Did you ever read anything in like the clutter bug school? No. There's a decluttering guide that I listened to an audio book of a few years ago and that also helped me a lot. But the clutter bug approach is like there's different types like you're a butterfly type or you're like a ladybug type or something. I'm a butterfly.

And that was where I learned that I have to see all my stuff and that was why I put up all those hooks. But there's this concept in it of like, every night give your house a hug, which is like you walk around tidying things up for like 15 minutes or like you do some dishes or like, you know, it could be five minutes. It could be one minute, you know?

But I love seeing it that way instead of like, your house is this like oppressive shell that you can never escape and you have to keep servicing and it'll never be clean and then men keep coming home and putting things there, you know, and just this feeling of like rage and revenge, which like also like maybe you can't maybe that's not something you can change with your own attitude in which case fire your husband or something. But I love recalibrating it as like, you know what, like give your house a hug. I love that.

And I was saying to you when we were talking about recording this episode that I think actually one of the lessons of the substance is give your house a hug, tidy up for, you know, just tidy up before you go to bed because then when you wake up, you maybe won't be so motivated to seek revenge on yourself. Yes, wow. Yep, it's a great point. Yeah, I love that attitude. And I think the major thing that both of us

have taken away from this experience of studying and reading this Peg Bracken book is that motto of, maybe it's not even making your house work for you, but working together with your house. Yes, that's right. Yeah, collaborating with your house and like having the equitable relationship with your house that you don't have with your husband and inspires you to find a better one.

Marry your house. Marry your house. Are we getting somewhere? I'll marry my house. I would marry your house too. Oh, let's all marry my house. Are we getting somewhere? I'll marry my house. I would marry your house too. Aw, let's all marry my house. Aw. She also, my favorite chapter I think is called,

Don't Just Do Something, Sit There. Sit there. Would you like to talk about that one? I have a lot of thoughts on that. Sure, let's see. We have a quote from Christopher Fry at the top that says, what after all is a halo, it's only one more thing to keep clean.

I love that. It is a fine and heart's only one more thing to keep clean. I love that. It is a fine and heartwarming thought if it be a random housekeeper who is doing the thinking that there are numerous household chores you don't need to do. Many problems if you don't face up to them will go away or will in one fashion or another solve themselves. So this is what you were talking about earlier with, yeah, you don't have to do all the things. Or there's like an earlier section that's like,

how to get dings out of furniture. And he's like, well, look, you can try this if you must. But also like- Furniture gets dinged. It's up to the table now to heal itself. It's out of your hands basically. And if you can't do it, you can't do it and it's fine. And if you can't, then just put a doily over it.

I think we do need to remind ourselves that like chips in counters and like things that you can't necessarily solve without a lot of effort are not anything that anyone's going to fault you for. It's up to the furniture to heal itself. This is a quote from that section. She says, anyway, there's nothing the matter with a few battle scars. Exactly.

Peg. In the case of both furniture and human beings. That's right. Let's okay. We have some block text in a few battle scars. Exactly, Peg. In the case of both furniture and human beings. That's right. Let's, okay, we have some block text in a couple of pages I'd like you to go to. For the purposes of clarity, this chapter has been neatly divided into three sections, the first of which is things you needn't do at all

and things you needn't do half so often as the experts would have you believe. Now that's clean talk in a nutshell, you know. That's right. Let's have some more if you would like. This, I think this is, this might be, I think, terrible advice. I would love your thoughts on it. You really needn't scrub bathtub rings.

Ah. Oh, just go on. You haven't any, you see. Oh, I see. Okay. All right. All right. If you keep a plastic bottle of liquid detergent handy on the tub rim, and if you rigorously train people to pour in a capful after they've closed the bathtub stopper and before they turn on the water. So she wants to be bathing with the turkish in the liquid detergent. Yeah.

I think it's terrible advice. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, maybe I'm sure detergent used to be less, well, I don't know. I'm not sure actually. Who the hell, some people know. If you're majoring in detergents, let me know. But like, when I think about getting in the bath with a Tide Pod. Oh my God. It's terrible. But people are also there, but then there are trends on Clean Talk that are like, use a Tide Pod to clean your sofa. And it's like, should, I mean, I guess we put it on our clothes. So like, it's not like hazardous exactly, but it's like using chemicals for not their intended purpose when they have been manufactured for like a highly specialized job and at a certain

concentration on that basis feels kind of dangerous to me. It's because we're obsessed with hacks. Yes. Whether they're actually helpful or not. And Peg is big on hacks. Yes. Well, but she also in the chapter on penny pinching talks about hacks that aren't worth it, which I appreciate.

But yeah, it is like this book is like basically hacks before anyone called them hacks because we had nothing to hack because computers were still busy with mimeographs or whatever they were doing. Whatever they were doing. So don't bathe with detergent for the love of God. No. If you're going to you didn't get the idea from me. I'm pretty positive. You got it from some other influencer who's telling people to do that right now. This is also, this is very of its time.

I just wanna read this for like the don't bother section. Also, you needn't iron pajamas or tea towels. Oh, don't worry Peg, I wasn't. For the record, I do not own an iron. I would never, I don't either. And I haven't had an iron since a time in my life when I was pretending to be a grown-up because I was 24 I

Don't believe in irons get yourself some wrinkle spray and just exactly Dress in non wrinkly material a girl for go for the hyana sport look if you must, you know, right? I just don't think there's anything wrong with wrinkles. No me sue me especially in linen, you know anything wrong with wrinkles? No, me either. Sue me. Especially in linen, you know? Linen with wrinkles has character, you know? Don't you want character?

Exactly, our battle scars. Don't you want your battle scars in your linen? So what have we learned, Sarah? What have we learned? Anything? Let me... I mean, yeah, what are your thoughts on like this book being about depression as a theme?

This again was something that was you and Sarah covered really beautifully, but I think it really all comes back to the last line of the preface of that book, which was it is nice to know you're not alone. And I think the emotional level of this book is very solidarity coded in that way and just comforting other women as she did not in the newspaper articles she wrote in the 1950s. She eventually learned that what we really need is to signal to each other that we get it if nothing else, that we're in the same boat and then, you know, do our best to work forward from there.

Yeah. And these are the parts of the book that have aged the best of all, I think. She writes at one point, never think unkindly about someone else's housekeeping, which I love, you know, because I think also in that sense of like the boomer norms of like talking about everybody's body for no reason, there's a similar again, sort of an over identifying with the house or maybe identifying a normal amount. There's the thing of like needing to complain about people's housekeeping the second you leave and that being you know,

us being raised in this sort of culture of femininity of like, you know, your house is an extension of your body. And so like your body, it will be mercilessly judged by other women who use it to feel better about themselves. And you're like, oh no, how am I supposed to feel positive emotions about such a place, you know? Exactly.

And if you are judging other people, judge, not lest ye be judged. If you are judging. If ye are judging other people's crab shells, then you're gonna be constantly thinking about whether or not people are judging your crab shells. And that's no way to live. Yeah. And if your shell is a beer can, you know, then like embrace that it's a beer can and embrace other people's beer can shells. It was all we could find. That's right.

For hermit crabs, who ironically you shouldn't have a single pets, I don't think. I think they like to have friends. And when I see dust in a person's house, I just think about how satisfying it would be if I could clean their house for them. And I don't think anything negative about it because there's dust everywhere in my house and we can't do it all. And that's the answer to like what happens when someone who is really, really good at cleaning houses and does it on a professional level sees your messy house. They're like,

oh yeah, let me get in there. Scritchy scratchy. Exactly. There's no judgment. Like, scratchy scratchy. And that's how I feel about organizing, you know? Yeah. I would love to just be able, you know what would be great is if you could go into the pantry of just a random Portlander and just organize their stuff for them. That'll be the crimes that I commit. That's a beautiful crime.

Or you could start a business of crime. No. Yeah, a crime business. Not a legitimate business. Those are too complicated. I'll just read some of my notes. You can get some Peg Bracken flavor. And if people wanna read this, you can find it on the internet archive

or there's many, many copies of it because this was a big best seller. Okay. All random housewives are on good borrowing terms with their next door neighbors. Eggle Weiss, a jar of chipped beef, beat the eggs frantically. I think that's a very good recipe writing.

With plenty of crackers and fresh canned or frozen fruit, either of these soups will keep people alive. Carry a small cookbook in your purse. You know the way it is with corn on the cob. And I wrote this on the page that happens to be facing a poem that I had an idea for like exactly one year ago. I was at a wedding with you and Chelsea and Chelsea and I snuck off to read Sylvia Plath poems to each other. As you do.

As we do and I had the idea of like because I think because Kelsey loves what is it the I forget which but the poem that's like so dramatic and so as Sylvia Plath was just like full of this like over the top slightly inscrutable imagery and Chelsea's like this poem is about Sylvia Plath Not wanting to visit someone in the hospital And then I made key chains that say Sylvia Plath but in the Waffle House sign font and configuration because it's the same number of letters and so I came up with a joke that was just Sylvia Plath goes to Waffle House. And finally, a year later, I wrote that poem. Are you going to read it for us? I'll try.

But I think Chelsea does a better Sylvia Plath. So I would like them to. Should I go get them? Yes. Yeah. Chelsea! I'm not getting up. Do less.

Chelsea-loo! Chelsea! I'm not getting up. Do less. Chelsea-loo! Don't just do something. Sit there. Okay, here is Chelsea Webber-Smith. I'm coming in. And so this poem is called Sylvia Plath Goes to Waffle House.

Clam-risted cooks scoop foam atop blood-glazed towers. I rise up hash brown, covered, smothered, and scattered. Grillmeister Beelzebub, you wake now, each gloaming to flatten my white liver until it screams. Thank you. Bloaming to flatten my white liver until it screams Thanks, Sarah absolutely stunning Homage and it's amazing. Thank you. Just took me a year of thinking about it Fucking really good. Really good. All right. Peace out, listeners.

Here's Miranda. I can't believe the talent I'm surrounded by. Wow. Neither can I. Okay, let me read a little bit more through my notes. I know a lady who lives in a perfectly lovely house and doesn't wax her kitchen linoleum. Although her system is heretical, we must remember that this lady has an equal chance of salvation with the rest of us, and she does some interesting things with her free

time too. I would like to say, and this is I think maybe what kicked off our big years long conversation about cleaning that we are continuing today, is that one thing I learned from cleaning people's houses is that no matter how clean and rich and immaculate someone's house is, they've got coffee stains on their door jams. Check it out everybody. That's, and you told me that before and I thought of that so many times and I would like, what does that mean to you that that secret?

I just think that there are little pockets of things that don't get looked at and don't get done no matter how scrupulous you are, no matter how spotless a house cleaner you are. There are just little things that happen in everyone's house. And I think they're really beautiful. I think there's something really beautiful about that particular imagery of like someone just like tottering around with their cup of coffee. And it's like, how does it get on the door jam? I've never actively noticed myself spilling coffee on a door jam. But it's like a surface too small for you to notice what

ends up on it I feel like unless you're like yeah being truly meticulous. Right it's just that liminal space that you don't think about. And then there's just a real kind of bonding in that because it's just something that happens in everyone's house no matter how much or little money you have or whether you're hiring a house cleaner or all this, you know, because it's like I clean my house, you know, I do the deep clean every two weeks or whatever or something when I can and today when I cleaned the whole house this morning just to get into the vibe not because I Thought I needed to or worried about it. Lo and behold coffee stains on the doorjam

They're everywhere. I know a lady who says everyone has coffee stains on their door jam. Is that anything? It is. I mean, I feel like it's like in this, the idea of like the house as the body, you know, that it's like the house becomes the seat of shame the same way that the body does. And if you try and, you know, and not all at once, but through sort of daily efforts, recalibrate your relationship to it. It's like, this is, you know, the structure that I live in and that is taking care of me and that I get to take care of as well and figure out what I want to do, what I want to bother with and what I want to cut corners on and what actually

affects my wellbeing and my happiness, you know, because I think we're so, we're clearly so affected by our environments. And how much of that is just something that I have been doing because I thought I had to do it, but maybe it doesn't matter. And even if people notice it, maybe I can trust them to, you know, not encounter everything in perfect shape all the time and take it in the manner in which it is intended. Yeah, it's beautiful. I love that.

And I love Peg Bracken. I'm so happy you love Peg too. And I guess maybe like my closing thought is just like, I don't care how you do it, but just like as long as you can take care of some of the things that you have to take care of in a way that you enjoy and that rewards you for the way you carry them out, then that's really what matters, I think. Not maintaining a certain appearance or keeping up with the Joneses, but figuring out if I'm going to do this stuff all the time, then how do I do it in a way that I like? Or if I can't persuade myself to like it, how do I get someone else to do it for me?

There it is. Beautifully put. Thank you, Sarah. And thank you, Peg. Thank you, Miranda. Where can we experience more of you? Or just what do you recommend? You can find me on the internet. I guess I'm on Instagram and my username is Miranda the swamp monster, which doesn't have anything to do with anything. But I work on this show and on American hysteria and on you are good. You edit this show and you make me sound so much smarter than I would all by myself. Oh my god, you sound just brilliant and I get to sit and listen to you talk all day

long and that's my job and it's the best. It's the only thing that could replace house cleaning. I love it. I also just like, I don't know, thank you for bringing cleaning as a social act and as a love language into my life as a concept, as opposed to something that you do out of the spirit of fear and revenge. Because I feel like the idea of opening up the secret house and making it something that we are inside of together makes all of it much less scary.

So thank you for being a hand across the pantry. Music You