Excerpt from dual review/essay:

...When Mason Currey’s first book, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, came out in 2013, it seemed inevitable that it would be a hit. Compiled from letters, diaries, interviews, and other archival artifacts, the book is a well-researched compendium of mini biographies of writers, painters, musicians, inventors, etc., told in the form of their most mundane daily activities, pet preferences, tastes, and schedules: Truman Capote’s voluntarily bedridden days spent “sipping and puffing”; Benjamin Franklin’s “air baths”; Gertrude Stein’s oversize bathtub and penchant for staring at cows.

Each of the entries in Daily Rituals is entertaining on its own, but as they accumulate, second orders of meaning reveal themselves. One through line is chemical: You could come away from the book prepared to make the somewhat bleak argument that what we call “artistic process” is just a never-ending alternation of uppers and downers moving through the central nervous system. The other big takeaway from zooming all the way into the bedrooms and living rooms and workrooms of history’s “great minds” is that it exposes just how much of the creative canon has been made outside the purview of market capitalism.

Many of these artists never really made a living from their work, and more often than not their idiosyncratic routines were directly sustained by the labor of spouses and servants, afforded by independent wealth, or both. Flaubert lay in bed all morning being tended to by domestic help and pounding on the wall when he felt like having a chat with his mummy; Stein’s cow-gazing was enabled by her partner Alice, who was tasked with physically driving the right bovine into the writer’s line of view; Freud’s wife Martha did everything for him, right down to squeezing his toothpaste onto the brush (isn’t that just a little bit, um, Freudian?). Likewise, those without the resources to hold themselves apart from the grinding demands of survival often suffered for it in direct and striking ways — both in their work and often in their health. None of which is new information, just hard to miss when you inhale a dozen descriptions of different variations on cocktail hour in a row.

Now Currey has produced a follow-up volume called Daily Rituals: Women at Work, published in March, which he introduces as “a sequel, and a corrective” to its predecessor’s “major flaw” of having included just 27 women among the original 161 artist profiles. Currey explains that this coda to recalibrate the gender balance is not only the right thing to do but a more robust realization of his original intention to provide modern readers with inspiration for their own creative pursuits. Focusing on women, Currey writes, opens up “dramatic new vistas of frustration and compromise” with which human beings contend in the ongoing struggle to figure out how to integrate their artistic work into their lives. Currey takes it as a given that frustrated and compromised is a state most of us will be able to relate to...