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"There’s an essay I love called “Making House,” by Rachel Cusk. She wrote about a friend of hers who “runs her house with admirable laxity … In the kitchen, you frequently feel a distinct crunching sensation from the debris underfoot.” The children’s rooms are “so neglected they have acquired a kind of wilderness beauty, like untouched landscapes.” This mother feels no shame about the mess; she’s free. And I wanted to be like that—to make the home, instead of the home making me.


But the crumbs got me down. I sometimes felt that they were a metaphor, that as I got older I was being ground down under the heel of my own life. All I could do was settle into the carpet."