Book Preview: The Dirt on Clean by Katherine Ashenburg

Canadian author.

I like to review a book after I’ve read it. I hope that’s a standard course of action for most reviewers. The problem is that I have a full-time job, which means that you are left to the whims of my schedule and reading habits, and this particular book cannot be washed away or soaked too long.

Katherine Ashenburg, author of The Mourner’s Dance, has published a new book with Knopf Canada, The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History.

As a cautionary sort with germs, I’ve often reflected on the origins of my cleanliness. It’s the fault of my mother and uncle. As a school kid, I came home for lunch. My mother, like all good mothers, would tell me to wash my hands. I’d run upstairs, turn the tap on, play with my hair, turn the tap off and run downstairs for my lunch. Notice there was no hand washing.

My uncle was a regular lunchtime guest. He was studying science at the university and one day brought along some books for me inspect. Science books. Science books, full of microscope photos of germs. Germs on your hands. Germs in your snot. Germs on school tables and door knobs.

I was a princessy girly-girl. I barely liked fuzzy caterpillars.

From then on I scoured my hands raw.

Did I mention that I was a child of extremes?

Katherine Ashenburg can relate to my experience. In the introduction of The Dirt on Clean, she talks about standards of hygiene reaching absurd levels in the late 50s and early 60s.

Quote: The idea of a body ready to betray me at any turn filled the magazine ads I pored over in Seventeen and in Mademoiselle … A long-running series of cartoon-style ads for Kotex sanitary napkins alerted me to the impressive horrors of menstrual blood, which apparently could announce its presence to an entire high school.

Oh, the hysteria. Imagine smelling offensive and not even knowing!

The Dirt on Clean is a history of cleanliness from a Western perspective, and what I like is Katherine’s writing style. She’s chatty yet thorough, gossipy yet respectful. She shares, for example, without naming names, some of the stories people confess about their own overly enthusiastic cleaning rituals or, more frequently, their avoidance of soap and water.

In the closing paragraph of the introduction, Katherine refers to Benjamin Franklin, who said that to understand the people of a country, he needed only to visit its graveyards.

Katherine says, “show me a people’s bathhouses and bathrooms, and I will show you what they desire, what they ignore, sometimes what they fear–and a significant part of who they are.”

So what smell are you? Mango, vanilla, smoke and sweat?

What would Katherine find in your bathroom that would betray your true colours (or smells).