A Role-Model for Us All Now

Caitriona Lally, writer and cleaner

Last week it was my good fortune to listen to Caitriona Lally. Who is she? That depends.

Sometimes I describe myself as a writer, and sometimes as a cleaner. It depends who is asking.

Caitriona works as a cleaner in Trinity College, Dublin. But she won the 2018 Rooney Prize for her first novel, Eggshells, and has written a second novel, Wunderland, due out in 2022.

Each weekday morning she mops and sweeps the museum building in the TCD, putting in the early shift. At the webinar in TCD’s Long Room Hub last week on The Culture of Work, she was asked a really good question:

Which gives you more satisfaction, a clean floor or a good sentence that you have written?

She only had to think for a moment:

A clean floor. Because there’s no debating that, it’s an objective fact. But in the case of writing a sentence, it is so subjective. I might think it is good, but my editor might disagree!

Her reasons for taking the cleaning job are really interesting:

There is no politics, no meetings, no networking - no stress. I had to stop doing an admin job because it was too stressful, too many conflicting demands. And I have my thoughts to myself as I work at the cleaning job, I can think about the characters and situations in my novel.

I think her choice is really interesting. There is a lot of talk about the Great Resignation. But really what’s happening, in my view, is that people are making choices about their lives that might not have occurred to them before. For some, that means getting out of a dead-end job. And for some it means challenging the social status quo to find a solution that works for them.