DISCOVERIES

A Broom of One’s Own

Words on Writing, Housecleaning, and Life

Nancy Peacock

Harper Perennial: 224 pp., $13.95 paper

“EVEN with a room of my own,” writes Nancy Peacock, professional housecleaner and writer, “writing is not a separate enterprise. It is not a jewel I keep in a velvet box. . . . Writing is more like the yellow rubber gloves I pull on every day. I need my gloves to keep my hands from getting too dry. And I need my writing to keep my life and my mind moist and supple.” Peacock likes housecleaning; it gives her time to write. If she’s lucky, her clients aren’t home while she cleans, giving her time to think; the details of their lives give her stories, characters. Some clients are appallingly inconsiderate, others can make real homes out of houses. Peacock contemplates clutter and the effects of divorce on the feeling of a house. She listens to Rumi on her Walkman. We often think of writing as a process needing the right atmospherics. Peacock puts us to shame.

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Forward From Here

Leaving Middle Age -- and Other Unexpected Adventures

Reeve Lindbergh

Simon & Schuster: 226 pp., $24

“THE youth of old age,” is what Anne Morrow Lindbergh called 60. “I used to see my life as an enormous self-improvement project,” writes her daughter, Reeve Lindbergh, reaching that age. “I may be a Grown-Up now . . . but I don’t think I’ve improved as a human being since the time I was twelve.” Reeve lives in Vermont; her delight in that rusticity is a source of peace and solace. In 2003, the three secret families of Charles Lindbergh, her father, became public knowledge. Reeve writes of this and other revelations with enviable equanimity: “Anger, bitterness, outrage, all were with me for a while. Then, one by one, they went away. . . . I cannot change the truth of the past, and as time goes on I realize that I have very little to complain about.” Two small revelations that, it seems to this reader, make for a happy life.

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House Rules

A Memoir

Rachel Sontag

Ecco: 262 pp., $24.95

MEMOIRS about family malfunction used to center on physical and sexual abuse. They’ve gotten subtler: Rachel Sontag’s harrowing tale of growing up with a controlling father is about emotional abuse. Her father, a do-gooder doctor, is charming in public, sarcastic, judgmental and downright scary in private. His family meetings are inquisitional, mock trials. The merest trace of makeup sends him into a spluttering fury. He tapes Rachel’s phone calls. As she grows older and more rebellious, Rachel watches her mother (whom her father insists is bipolar and forcibly medicates) grow increasingly depressed and unable to break out of the marriage. When Rachel tells him that he makes her feel like dying, he threatens to have her hospitalized for suicidal tendencies. Punishment is the only response he knows. A social worker at Rachel’s high school helps to get her out of the house. She lives for a while in a group home; when she returns, the situation has gotten worse.

Sontag’s lean writing captures the tension -- the feeling of family as prison. Each time an outside observer recognizes her father’s manipulative cruelty, the reader feels a little surge of hope. Get out of there, Rachel! Get out!

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susan.reynolds@latimes.com