How I got CLEAN
After years of drug addiction following the death of her father, Michele Kirsch finally ditched the pills — and stayed off them by scrubbing other people’s houses
MIcHELE was six when her father was killed in a train crash. ‘ There were two casualties: my father, and a nun . . . All I hoped was that he was asleep, and that the nun was, too.’
Thus begins Michele Kirsch’s extraordinary memoir of drug addiction, alcoholism and domestic cleaning. Rarely can a dark memoir have been so comic, or a comic memoir so dark.
The other casualty of the crash was Kirsch herself. From that day in 1967, bile rose each morning in her throat. She found she had no appetite for food, or for life itself. ‘All I believed in was death: the power of it to destroy not only the life of the dead person but of all the people who knew and loved them.’
Her three decades of drug addiction began at 15, when her doctor in Queens, New York, prescribed pills to help her combat ‘the permanent nausea of grief’.
The more pills she took, the more she needed to get through the day. Her favourite words on any prescription sheet were ‘Take as needed’.
That seemed a licence to treat them like sweets. By the time she went to college in Boston (she soon dropped out), she had pill bottles lined up around her electric typewriter.
The ‘taking as needed’ enabled her to keep her panic attacks at a level that made her seem just about normal. But her life was spinning out of control. Though ‘pharmaceutically functioning’, she was a nervous, shaking, insomniac wreck.
She admits, with startling honesty, that grief was a useful Get Out Of Life Free card. ‘It is hard to be the prettiest, or the cleverest, or the funniest, but it is dead easy to be the saddest. That I could do.’
When the U.S. authorities pursued her, after she’d forged a prescription for a large consignment of Valium, she decided to leave the U.S. for England (her father had been English).
SHE rented damp bedsits and married an alcoholic: that didn’t last long. Later she married the nice friend of her ex-boyfriend’s best friend, with whom she had two children.
The years of early motherhood were the happiest of her life. She tried to be normal and non-addicted, but when someone on their Stoke Newington estate called her daughter ‘ a white b****’, she had a relapse.
All too soon she was more addicted than ever to Valium, ordering it online in bulk from Romania. She was knocking back neat spirits while cooking the children’s supper, too.
Everyone suffered. A counsellor said to her later: ‘ You stole a mother from your children.’
She ended up in a drug rehabilitation centre in Bournemouth: ‘ Emaciated, covered in sores, with broken ribs, stumbling about in a drug-withdrawal haze, punctuated by moments of sheer terror, I am broken.’
Just another depressing memoir of drug and alcohol addiction? Well, no. This one is enhanced, made strangely hilarious and given a refreshingly different kind of poignancy, with its 26 ‘cleaning’ interludes. These appear between most chapters, in a different font, and I found myself savouring each one.
When Michele was clean and sober, and trying to stay clean and sober, in London between 2015 and 2016, she became a cleaner for a cleaning agency.
The goal for the cleaners was to be ‘cleaner of the Month’, but you know Michele is never going to be. She’s too busy being nosy.
She has a Nora Ephron-ish eye for the small poignancies of other people’s domestic lives (as well as her own).
In these 26 vignettes about cleaning the houses, flats and offices of total strangers, she puts her finger on the varieties of human pathos she encounters. With her own inner sadness, she has a nose for the sadness of others.
She finds porn mags down by the man’s side of a marital bed, in a house where the wife has a degenerative illness.
cleaning the flat of an ultra-tidy control-freak who collects shoes — and makes Michele put on special hygienic slippers and ‘never shouts, just does it again, himself, the right way, talking through his method as one would talk to an idiot’ — she spots a photo of him as a young boy, jumping up in the air beside
the sea, his feet covered in sand. What was it, she wonders, that turned that carefree boy into an obsessivecompulsive maniac whose favourite item is his anti-viral hand gel?
in the filthy flat of a recently separated man, she hears a message being spoken into his answerphone: ‘Grow up. Get a lawyer. Let’s do this nicely.’
i suppose all women know that strange connection between feeling a bit out of control of our lives and the urge to clean. There’s nothing like a good polish of our kitchen surfaces to make us feel we have control over one small corner of the world, at least.
in Michele’s case it seems her urge to clean people’s houses was an extreme example of this syndrome.
‘Cleaning gave me a feeling that if i started from the outside in, then the messed-up things inside me would also take some sort of shape or order, by osmosis.’
Cleaning also makes her sad because she glimpses other families’ happy lives. She sees one mother taking her children breakfast in bed. ‘There i am, the old drug addict, cleaning the toilet, watching the world race by.’
Cleaning for a radio producer, she writes: ‘He is doing a job i would love to do myself. He is in his little office with the dog, while i am in the bathroom next door, removing mushrooms from the floor tiles with a knife and some bleach.’
Apart from anything else, this book is a paean to the unsung heroism of the agency cleaner, who lives so near yet so far from the comfortable worlds of the people he or she cleans for.
The dry, black humour of the book makes it a pleasure to read. i won’t forget the meeting for agoraphobics Michele attends, where only two people turn up because the others can’t face leaving the house. ‘Apologies from Francis, Danita, Georgia, Ellen . . .’
There’s a poignant moment in 2011, when Michele is out of rehab and back in the real world. At first she tries too unsubtly to make friends with her estranged children, endlessly visiting and baking cookies for them, which does not impress them one bit. A FAVOURITE song comes on the radio and Michele shouts up to her daughter: ‘it’s on the radio now! if you come down you can still catch it.’ Her daughter patiently explains to her that you can now listen to any song at any time, via the internet.
She’s missed so much while she’s been in the depths of addiction.
Slowly but surely, though, she does rebuild her relationships with her son and daughter.
‘i am back in the land of the living,’ Michele writes. Though no longer in the family home, she visits often.
‘Most days i talk with my kids, or even hang out with them.
‘This is my greatest pleasure and gratitude in life.’
What a journey! And what a lot of bleach and spray polish she has got through, to get herself to this point of calm in her mid-50s.