A Clean Kitchen. A Filthy Secret.

A reflection on memoir, truth, and in which I talk dirty and no one dies.

Lulu Bell

Prefer to listen? Press play below for the audio version:

CONTENT NOTE: This essay explores female desire, sexual autonomy, and domestic architecture that holds non-normative intimacy without rupture. It engages themes of authorship, power, and the discomfort surrounding memoir when a woman’s story includes pleasure, control, and no clear moral resolution.

Memoir isn’t in crisis but it is on trial. Again.

This time, it’s The Salt Path. A story that moved hundreds of thousands, now dragged into the spotlight over whether the life it described was real. Whether the money was truly stolen. Whether the homelessness was genuine. Whether her husband was dying, or merely unwell.

Whether the story was, in the end, fact or fiction dressed up as fact.

This is the bargain, isn’t it? We say we want truth, but what readers often seem to want is something raw, unfiltered, unshaped, and unedited.

We want to believe events unfolded exactly as described, not as arranged on the page. And when we sense narrative design, when a story has been deliberately structured, when the edges feel too tidy, we begin to doubt the storyteller altogether.

Suspicion creeps in. We ask whether it really happened that way. We begin demanding proof, as if memoir were a courtroom and the writer’s job was to deliver evidence under oath.

I’m not interested in defending memoir.

I’m interested in the moment we’re in, and what we’re actually asking from writers when we say “tell your story.”

I’ve been working on a memoir. It’s the next book after two in two years, and it’s unlike anything I’ve written before.

Thursday, I Come Home is a short piece drawn from that work-in-progress. It doesn’t represent the whole book, and it certainly isn’t the centre of it. But it shares something I wanted to name clearly: the fact that desire, especially domestic, repeatable, female desire, is rarely granted space on the page without being pathologised, punished, or turned into plot. This piece resists all of that. It’s one scene, written on purpose, standing on its own terms.

Last night, I read Thursday, I Come Home aloud at WRITE UP in London, an exciting literary event themed around Home and Community. The recording is below. *You might want to keep it off speaker*.

I wrote this piece because it speaks directly to the Home and Community theme, though not in the way audiences often expect.

It explores a deliberately chosen domestic architecture, one that allows for transgressive intimacy, without rupture.

It reframes home not as a prison to escape, but as a foundation sturdy enough to hold contradiction.

This is a story of chosen community, erotic ritual, and the sacredness of being known beyond the monogamous script. It asks:

What if home made room for the parts of us that needed to leave and return, fed?

There’s a reason stories of female desire so often end in ruin. The wife weeps. The husband discovers everything. The lover disappears. Order is restored, but only after punishment. Thursday, I Come Home doesn’t follow that script. It doesn’t tear anything down. It simply makes space.

That, I suspect, is where the discomfort lives, not in the sex itself, but in the absence of suffering.

Red Hot Chilli Pepper, Sasha Robinson

I didn’t write Thursday, I Come Home to provoke. I wrote it because I wanted to test what could be held, on the page, in the voice, in a room. I also wanted to test what I could write, speak, and share. Writing (and reading) public work is vulnerable.

Because writing female desire without punishment still feels politically charged.

Because erotic freedom, especially when rooted in domestic life, is almost always misread as either scandal or confession. But this is neither. It’s design. It’s a scene with a structure strong enough to carry all the contradictions, sex, marriage, mothering, hunger, and not break.

The deeper discomfort, I think, is that memoir asks to be received as both truth and art, and many of us don’t quite know how to hold both at once. We come to the page wanting to believe, but also wanting to verify. We want to feel something, but only on terms we recognise.

And when a piece resists the expected trajectory, when it offers contradiction without collapse, or erotic clarity without regret, it doesn’t quite land as literature or diary. It hovers. And in that space, it’s not the writer who gets exposed. It’s us.

[Even before I stepped off stage, I knew my piece had stirred something. Not just because of its content, but because it raised the kinds of questions that linger long after the lights come up. Questions about marriage, sex, structure, honesty, and the sheer audacity of living more than one life. People wanted to talk, not out of scandal, but curiosity. The good kind. The sincere and hungry kind.]

This is just one slice of a larger body of work.

But the questions it raises are the ones that tend to surface whenever a woman writes desire without apology: How did you negotiate this with your husband? Was your marriage in trouble? Did he also take a lover? If you’re not into polyamory, what is this? Was the sex at home no longer enough? Where is your lover now? Did you wash when you returned, and if not, why?

But the question I return to, the one that underpins all the others, is this: how many lives do we allow ourselves to live? And why settle for one, when we could live a thousand?

Some conversations don’t belong in an essay. They belong in a private room.

That’s why I’m hosting a LITTLE SALON on WANT a free, virtual gathering, not solely about sex, but about self-authorship.

What does self-authorship mean?

It means creating a life that holds maternal ambition, erotic hunger, chosen family, and (sometimes often) contradictory longings, without apology, and without permission. It means freedom from the roles we’re handed: good girl, perfect mother, tidy wife.

This Salon will be invitation-only. I’ll be reaching out personally to those I want in the room.

BUT if you feel called to this, please reach out to me - drop me a note right away so I can include you.

If this is the kind of conversation you’ve been waiting for, ask for a seat.

P.S. Coming Next week: A short essay on (possibly) the hardest question I faced before reading this piece live:

What does a woman wear when she’s about to undress a room with her voice while knowing she’ll also be read, misread, and remembered by what she wears?

P.S. If you liked this article, check out some of my others here: