Even clean people fall asleep with chocolate bars in their hands. Just ask Jolie Kerr, author of My Boyfriend Barfed in My Handbag… and Other Things You Can’t Ask Martha.
“I woke up — chocolate just everywhere,” says Jolie Kerr. “At least I wasn’t smoking a cigarette in bed! But what was I thinking?”
Jolie Kerr is the author of the hit column “Ask a Clean Person.” She has been writing the column for three years and has a huge following of fellow Clean People — and dirty people, too.
Her book takes the column into more depth. It’s not just Q&A anymore; Kerr gets into detail and does her best to save your day.
Of course, Kerr has a clean house. “It’s a control mechanism,” she says. “If things are out of order, I feel out of order.” However, she’s not here to moralize or force her cleanliness on you. Just because she eats nachos with a fork and knife doesn’t mean you have to, too.
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Kerr is a huge fan of Martha Stewart. (What Clean Person isn’t?) But, according to Kerr, “I think Martha enjoys making people feel bad. I don’t want people to read my book and feel dirty or like they’re a failure!” Instead, she hopes her book can calm the worried cleaner. When disaster strikes, you will be ready.
She is not a formally trained Clean Person. She did not attend Clean Person University. Instead, she’s become an expert through trial and error. She says, “I don’t always have the answers, and I have to do research. I’ll never know everything, but I can always learn something new.”
She thinks learning is important in the world of clean. She believes most people hate cleaning because they aren’t confident in what they’re doing.
Her book, My Boyfriend Barfed in my Handbag… and Other Things You Can’t Ask Martha, is on bookshelves now. In it, Kerr tackles everything from floors to wedding emergencies to laundry to… the Jizzcliner?
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“That was the most infamous question I’ve ever gotten!” says Kerr. “A girl was moving in with her boyfriend, and the only issue she had was with his hunter green La-Z-Boy, the arms of which were covered in old semen stains! How did she clean it? OxiClean, of course. But I don’t think anyone can ever top that story.”
And that’s the point of the book. The world is a dirty place, and we can’t always call our mothers to ask about, well, semen. Kerr’s book is open, honest and funny — and incredibly useful to modern women.
She does not want readers to take things too seriously. “I want people to have a sense of humor when things go wrong,” she says. “Life is hard enough. I’m not here to make it any harder. I’m here to make it better.”
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