Accidents In The Home

reviewer: Bindii

month entered: August

author: Tessa Hadley

year of publication: 2003

review:

A brilliant quote from a vey average book:

"And anyway, there were all these other uncreative things she had to do, taking up an impossible space, swelling to stuff out every corner of her time and to smother any chinks she had fondly imagined she was keeping for a grown up coffee and a read of the paper. Now it was lunchtime; the children must be fed. One felt as if one invented this stuff, in some kind of crazy conspiracy of martyrdom; sure other better mothers had found sweeter, lighter ways of passing their days than this? She must be producing this impassed, this stickily inflating burden of routine, out of sheer spite: it must be oozing from her own smothered vengefulness. But if she tried to come clean and step out of it, she was confronted with real unanswerable problems. What would happen if she didn't feed them? Didn't dress them? Didn't tidy the house and wash the dishes and wash the clothes and shop and cook? It wouldn't be liberation, they would just drown deeper and more miserable in their sticky mire. The domestic machine required her drudgery, implacably; the hours of her life were the fuel it needed just to tick over."

______________________