The presentation aims to nuance two narratives: 1) that the struggles of “women” during the coronavirus lockdown necessarily concerned balancing work and child care demands, and 2) that single, childfree women must have been unconcernedly enjoying a surge of productivity. Based on autoethnographic methods, the talk argues that given the disastrous circumstance of the global pandemic, no-one is ideally situated to perform to the always unattainable standards of toxic, neoliberal productivity discourses, which made the coronavirus lockdown seem like a cosy writing retreat.