Tasmanian author says house work is really just love

"I was totally reduced, mopping up the coffee on the carpet, the blood on my toe from the broken cup," Hayward said.

"But that's domestic life sometimes; you need to keep going in the face of whatever it may be."

Hayward - an Adelaide-born writer and former psychologist who's lived in London, Melbourne and now Hobart - was in Launceston on Saturday to sign copies of her latest book, Home Work, at Petrarch's Bookshop.

Her fourth book is part memoir, part first person self-help book, and encompasses the philosophy which helped Hayward through the carpet-cleaning nightmare of that morning: an embrace of house work as a practice that, ultimately, is "about love and mindfulness".

"A quarter of our life is spent doing those things that we call maintenance activities," Hayward said.

"What we call boring, repetitive activities that we want to pass off to someone else - cooking, errands, cleaning, gardening - actually may be our salvation in terms of our psyche.

"Those are the times that we let go and we have enough bandwidth in our mind to actually digest our experience."

Hayward's book - formatted almost as a collection of essays - looks at the domestic side of life, expressly her own over the last 30 years, with an eye to change the way people approach their home lives.

"Housekeeping, for me, is caring enough about things that I don't care about because I care about this whole thing, which is love," Hayward said.

"For me doing the housekeeping is so that you can do something creative every day, it's not an end in itself.

"It's kind of necessary preliminary to having a decent life; even if you live in a cupboard, you have to clean your cupboard.

"The whole housekeeping forum is an invitation to know that every day we fail, and every day we try again - that's a lot like life."

Helen Hayward's House Work is available at Petrarch's Bookshop in Launceston.