June 1995 Issue [Readings] The case against chores Download PDF Adjust Share by Jane Smiley, This article is only available as a PDF to subscribers. Download PDF Tags 20th century Child rearing Housekeeping United States Work ethic More from Jane Smiley New Books The title of Margaret Drabble’s new novel, The Pure Gold Baby (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26), refers to “Lady Lazarus,” a poem Sylvia Plath wrote a few months before she committed… New Books At the end of a chapter on Livia, the wife of the Roman emperor Augustus, in Confronting the Classics (Liveright, $28.95), the Cambridge scholar Mary Beard reminds us that when… New Books The memoir is a tempting but treacherous form. As the English novelist Rachel Cusk writes in Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $20), “Unclothed, truth can be… Adjust Share