Marriage, motherhood and memoirs
AJN readers will no doubt be familiar with Kerri Sackville from her “Life And Other Crises” column. And now fans of the column can rejoice because in May, Sackville is publishing her very first book, When My Husband Does The Dishes …
Described (by Sackville) as a book for “everybody who’s ever had a partner or who’s got children or who loves or knows someone who does” – pretty much everybody – When My Husband Does The Dishes … is part memoir, part marriage and motherhood guide. The blurb says “part faux guide” but in truth it’s as truthful and uncompromising an insight into modern womanhood as any marriage or motherhood self-help book.
Admittedly, as an unmarried, childless woman not looking to marry or start a family anytime soon, I haven’t read many such books, but should that time ever come I’d much prefer an unflinchingly honest companion like When My Husband Does The Dishes … than some dry tome on making marriage work.
Not that Sackville set out to write a marriage or motherhood self-help guide, or that this is what When My Husband Does The Dishes … is.
“I really felt that there was a place for a tell-all book about marriage and motherhood,” she says. “We’re starting to talk more about motherhood and the truth behind it now, but I hadn’t seen anything on marriage. Everything you read – fiction or non-fiction – is either about falling in love or breaking up. Or affairs. But there is almost nothing about the reality of waking up next to the same person month after month, year after year, almost indefinitely.”
Sackville lives in Sydney’s eastern suburbs with her husband Tony and their three children – a son, 11, and two daughters aged nine and three. So how on earth did she find the time to write a book?
“I look back and I think: I don’t know how I did it,” she notes. “I do know that the house was a pigsty for most of that time; laundry would just pile up and my husband would say ‘Do you think it’s just going to get washed by osmosis if you place it next to the washing machine?’”
When I naively asked if her husband ever helped out with such chores, Sackville laughed. “Are you being funny?” she asked. “No, my husband’s great. There were times when he’d come home at 8pm and spend an hour cleaning the kitchen because otherwise we weren’t going to find a plate. But he can’t do it; he’s running his own architect practice and he’s flat out. So eventually we hired Gab, my tattooed, Goth, nanny. Only we would end up with this very unusual nanny!”
Nanny in place, Sackville wrote whenever she could snatch a second. She didn’t need to do much research, obviously, as she’d spent 11 years “researching” as a mother and a wife. But her friends and her blog were a great help.
“I just started talking to people,” she explains. “You don’t have to be a close friend of mine for me to start asking personal questions. And people were saying ‘Yes! I’m the same. I’m trying to stay up long enough so that my husband doesn’t want to have sex when I come to bed.’”
And while she admits to some exaggeration for comic purposes, Sackville also points out that everything in the book is real, and has happened to her. “My toddler was sitting next to me in the toilet in Bondi Junction once and just started yelling ‘DO A POO, MUMMY, DO A POO!’ That hasn’t happened to everybody, but everybody’s got a story like that.”
And if reading such stories can make someone else “feel better about themselves and their challenges” by laughing at Sackville’s, the she’ll have achieved what she set out to do.
When My husband Does The Dishes … is published in May by Random House. $32.95 (rrp)
REPORT: Melanie Sheridan
PHOTO: Author Kerri Sackville
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