Clutter: An Untidy History by Jennifer Howard

 

Summary (from the publisher): "I'm sitting on the floor in my mother's house, surrounded by stuff." So begins Jennifer Howard's Clutter, an expansive assessment of our relationship to the things that share and shape our lives. Sparked by the painful two-year process of cleaning out her mother's house in the wake of a devastating physical and emotional collapse, Howard sets her own personal struggle with clutter against a meticulously researched history of just how the developed world came to drown in material goods. With sharp prose and an eye for telling detail, she connects the dots between the Industrial Revolution, the Sears & Roebuck catalog, and the Container Store, and shines unsparing light on clutter's darker connections to environmental devastation and hoarding disorder. In a confounding age when Amazon can deliver anything at the click of a mouse and decluttering guru Marie Kondo can become a reality TV star, Howard's bracing analysis has never been more timely.

Review: "Clutter, like emotional chaos, has a way of running in families, passed down like curly hair or blue eyes or musical ability" (14). 

Part personal reflection, part history, this text dives into the history and causes of clutter building up in our homes, and ways we might approach it. When the author's mother had to be moved to assisted living, as the only child she was left with the task of clearing out the mounds of trash and belongings in her mother's home. In detailing her own personal struggle with clutter, Howard also takes her readers on a journey through the history of amassing personal possessions and the different ways humans have approached them in their homes over the years. 

I did really like that Howard tries to be generous to the many who struggle with clutter and not just paint it all in a negative light, which is frequently how it is portrayed. For instance, she references a hoarding expert who said, "People with too much stuff are people with good intentions. They're artists, they're environmentalists, they're historians. Don't forget that there's a person in the room with all those boxes and bins" (30). And "Calling your parents' belongings clutter seems demeaning," [...] "We're dealing with a vast amount of memory-laden, historical, occasionally valuable, often irreplaceable acquisitions. In short, we're talking about the museum of your family's life" (116). While at the same time, she recognizes the immense burden these belongings frequently are, not only through sharing her personal struggles with her mother's vast collection, but also through the wisdom of experts on the subject, "Do not ever imagine that anyone will wish - or be able - to schedule time off to take care of what you didn't bother to take care of yourself" (112). 

This book includes chapters to provide brief overview of historically relevant practices that have contributed to society's current state of possessions: Victorian collecting habits, the rise of catalog mail ordering, the American practice of having bigger and bigger homes and needing stuff to fill it, the rise of secondhand economies and practices to get rid of all this stuff and trash. While informative, these chapters do just provide brief overviews and certainly not comprehensive histories of each topic. But it did help shape and guide her narrative to provide a frame of reference for how so many of us ended up in the current position of being overwhelmed by all of our things and all of the things we will inherit. 

Ultimately, this book doesn't provide some sort of magic cure or definitive answer on what the solution is to this crisis of things. But it does put it into context and view it with more compassion. It isn't our fault that we have too much and feel drowning in stuff and may we all be a bit kinder to ourselves by what many of us see as too much junk in our homes. 

Stars: 4