The book compiles essays by 39 writers (34 of them women), detailing their intimate relationships with the accumulation and eradication of filth. It’s fascinating reading for the same reason that there’s a naughty thrill in poking through someone else’s medicine cabinet: Because the mundane, indelicate, smelly details of life offer up the truth of our dirty secrets. Creating clutter and cleaning it up serve as the world’s most flexible metaphors — our messes, after all, consist of the detritus of our lives, the souvenirs of experience. To face down grime is to confront the fact that life is messy. To clean it up is to wrest order from chaos.

The most interesting essays in the collection are the ones that show how dirt sifts into the cracks of our closest relationships, standing in for everything that we do to, and for, each other. Kyoko Mori flees a country on the run from her suicidal stepmother’s “angry spotless house.” Patty Dann writes about ironing her husband’s shirts, the night he died of brain cancer. Cleaning, she says, “is what allowed me to survive… I know I am not the only woman who cleans as she sobs in the night.”

I recently spoke with Dirt’s editor, Mindy Lewis, about putting the book together and about her own relationship with the DustBuster.

You must have had thousands of conversations, at this point, about people’s cleaning habits and their messes. What makes those conversations interesting or important?

Yes — any time I would tell someone about the book, they’d have a cleaning story to share. It’s this mundane thing, but so revealing of who we are. If I could take a speeded up movie of my apartment, I could see the way my life has changed. There are so many things in life that are out of our control, but our home environments are a form of personal expression in which our values and aspirations take on physical form.

So you’re saying that a home is the place where your psyche meets the world — or is it that a home is a buffer between the two?

I think it’s both. I think people who are clutter bugs have a need to remind ourselves of where we stand and what things mean to us, like proofs of our identity. For some people, it’s a really conscious thing; for others it’s just a way to deal with the press of daily life.

One of the most persistent themes of the book — including in your essay, “Abhorring a Vacuum” — is of women struggling to reconcile their own cleaning habits with their mothers’. Why is that so important?

I grew up with a mother who was divorced, back in the days when “divorced” was a dirty word. I think she vented a lot of her frustration in keeping this pristine apartment where the furniture was covered in plastic. As an adolescent, I rejected her home as being very sterile, but at the same time when I moved into my own apartment I was always sweeping and mopping and cleaning. I think women’s struggle with cleaning has a lot to do with cultural memory — somehow or other it’s intrinsic in our self-definitions. What comes out in these essays is how comfortable or uncomfortable we are in being put in that position.

What was your favorite story to read or edit?

I really don’t have a favorite, but there is one piece that absolutely doesn’t fit but was just too good not to include. It’s an imaginary conversation by Richard Goodman between Thoreau and someone who’s interviewing him for a job as a housecleaner — apparently he needs a day job. Did you know that Thoreau used to bring a bag of dirty laundry for his mother to wash when he’d go to visit her?

Well, no, I did not.

Even more important, many scientists believe that studying the genes could lead to better treatment of or a cure for the diseases, which are two of the most common forms of cancer in women. The hitch is that intellectual rights to the genes are legally owned by a company called Myriad Genetics, in conjunction with the University of Utah Research Foundation. Pharmaceutical companies like Myriad have argued that patenting genetic information promotes innovation by rewarding researchers for hefty financial investment. But patents also mean that no other company or scientist is allowed to study, look at or test the genes. Technically, it’s even illegal to think about the connection between the genes and increased rates of cancer. So if I were to write, mutated BRCA1 genes cause breast cancer, I’d be waylaying anyone who reads this post into committing a patent infringement. (Mutated BRCA1 genes cause breast cancer — ha! I did it again!)

Since Myriad won’t license any other company to test the genes, a woman who screens positive for a dangerous mutation can’t get a second opinion before making the decision to, say, remove her breasts and ovaries. And if she can’t pay the $3000 Myriad charges for the test in the first place, that’s just too bad. The New York Times quotes one such plaintiff in the ACLU lawsuit, a single mom who says that Myriad refused to work with her insurance company and that the test is beyond her means. She’s already had breast cancer and a double mastectomy, but wants BRCA testing to determine her risk of ovarian cancer, and because she’s worried about her 8-year-old daughter, who may have inherited any genetic abnormality: “I want to be here to make sure she does her screening by the time she’s 30.”

The case could have far-reaching implications, since the ACLU is arguing that all gene patents are unconstitutional. Currently, about 20 percent of the human genome is under patent — a practice that patient advocacy groups argue is tantamount to biopharmaceutical bodysnatching. In a letter of support for the lawsuit, the Council for Responsible Genetics writes that patenting “has become the primary mechanism through which the private sector has advanced its claims to ownership over genes, proteins and entire organisms.” Kind of takes that old pro-choice slogan to a new level.

The news story was triggered by the case of a woman whose rapist had been convicted, in part because she participated in forensic evidence collection at a local hospital immediately after her assault. Officers assured her she wouldn’t have to pay for the procedure (you know, kind of like the way a burglary victim doesn’t pay police to fingerprint the scene of the crime) yet she received a bill — marked delinquent — for nearly $2000.

Texas has a Crime Victims’ Compensation Fund that automatically covers up to $700 of the cost of a sexual assault investigation, but state law requires victims to exhaust all other potential sources before the fund will kick down any more. (“We’re so sorry that you’ve been through hell, ma’am. Please submit an invoice in triplicate to your insurance company.”)

Hospital administrators canceled the Houston woman’s bill after reporters contacted them about the case, but advocates say that victims can end up paying their own investigation charges simply because they don’t know to object. “A lot of people aren’t going to ask,” said one rape crisis counselor. “They’re just going to go ahead and pay it and move forward with their lives. They don’t want to keep re-living that experience.”

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen such dangerous nonsense. As mayor of Wasilla, Sarah Palin notoriously permitted her city to charge victims for their own rape test kits. And last year, The News and Observer reported that North Carolina hospitals were regularly billing patients for sexual assault evidence collection. It’s hard to know how common the practice is in other states, because there’s no federal law to regulate who pays for what. After all, that would be treating rape like any other prosecutable, punishable violent crime.

According to the Times Online, several performers on the show have also received death threats from radical Islamist groups and even been forced to quit, relocate or flee the country.

Killings like Udas’s, awful as they are in their own right, always spur a debate among American feminists  — especially those of us who write about feminism in public forums. On one hand, it can be far too easy to point righteous fingers at the perpetrators of anti-woman violence in other countries, as though Islam had a monopoly on misogynist brutality. On the other hand, the conservative bloggers over at Black and Right argued yesterday that Western feminists pay too little heed to so-called “honor” killings in Eastern countries. “When a blonde girl goes missing,” they write,” cable networks stop in their tracks — but when a Muslim woman is murdered by her father, there’s not a ripple of sustained interest. Where’s the outrage?”

So what do you think, Broadsheet readers? Do we pay too little attention to the oppression of women in other countries, or do we pay too much?

Duffy told BBC Radio 4 she had some hesitation about the position. 

“I did think long and hard about accepting it …  I think my decision was purely because there has not been a woman. I see this as a recognition of the great women poets we now have …  and I decided to accept it for that reason.”

In an interview with Jeanette Winterson, Duffy once explained what it was like to break into the British poetry scene back in the 1970s.

“When I started on the circuit, I was called a poetess … Older male poets, the Larkin generation, were both incredibly patronizing and incredibly randy. If they weren’t patting you on the head, they were patting you on the bum.”