Clutter: An Untidy History

by Jennifer Howard

Overview

“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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781953368096
Publisher:	Belt Publishing
Publication date:	01/04/2022
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	575,259
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Jennifer Howard is a former contributing editor and columnist for The Washington Post and a former senior reporter for The Chronicle of Higher Education. A frequent contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and a contributing writer at EdSurge, she has written for Slate, Bookforum, Fine Books & Collections, and Humanities magazine, among many other publications. Her fiction has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, The Collagist, Blue Moon Review, the collection DC Noir, and elsewhere. She lives in Washington, DC.

Table of Contents

Prologue. In My Mother's House: A Personal History of Clutter 11

Chapter 1 Finder Keepers: Hoarding Disorder and Shame 23

Chapter 2 Material World: The Victorian Roots of Consumer Culture 41

Chapter 3 Shop and Drop: From Mail-Order Catalogs to Amazon Prime 67

Chapter 4 A Place for Everything: The Endless War on Disorder 89

Chapter 5 Waste, Want, and Wealth: Decluttering as Activism and Entrepreneurship 119

Chapter 6 Final Destinations: Clutter as Junk and Eco-Catastrophe 141

Epilogue. The Changing Landscape of Clutter 163

Afterword 171

Bibliography 179

Acknowledgments 185

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Jennifer Howard has written a brilliant and beautiful meditation on the nature of our attachment to things. Reading Clutter made me long for a life without clutter." —Malcolm Gladwell, New York Times bestselling author and host of the "Revisionist History" podcast

"In Clutter, Jennifer Howard offers a fascinating and insightful account of what becomes of the stuff that we accumulate in our homes and lives. It's a powerful reminder of how the deeply personal acts of daily life are shared across families, cultures, economies, and countries, and a moving account of how one author's struggle to manage her family's clutter led to a deeper understanding of what matters most in all of our lives." —Adam Minter, author of Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade and Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale

Editorial Reviews

"Jennifer Howard has written a brilliant and beautiful meditation on the nature of our attachment to things. Reading Clutter made me long for a life without clutter." —Malcolm Gladwell, New York Times bestselling author and host of the "Revisionist History" podcast

"In Clutter, Jennifer Howard offers a fascinating and insightful account of what becomes of the stuff that we accumulate in our homes and lives. It's a powerful reminder of how the deeply personal acts of daily life are shared across families, cultures, economies, and countries, and a moving account of how one author's struggle to manage her family's clutter led to a deeper understanding of what matters most in all of our lives." —Adam Minter, author of Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade and Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale

"Howard’s exploration of one dark corner of consumer culture is quick-witted and insightful—and, appropriately for the subject, refreshingly concise. ... A keen assessment of one of society’s secret shames and its little-understood consequences."—Kirkus Reviews

"In her stern and wide-ranging new manifesto, “Clutter: An Untidy History,” journalist Jennifer Howard takes the anti-clutter message a step further. Howard argues that decluttering is not just a personally liberating ritual, but a moral imperative, a duty we owe both to our children and to the planet."—Jennifer Reese, Washington Post

"How and why stuff accumulates is the subject of Jennifer Howard’s new book Clutter: An Untidy History. It begins with her cleaning out her mother’s home—an experience many people of a certain age are familiar with. The book then tackles hoarding disorder, the Victorian roots of consumerism, the history of mail-order catalogues leading to today’s Amazon Prime, how controlling clutter has historically been “women’s work,” and the problem of waste and how it damages the environment. Clutter thoroughly unpacks the topic."—Eve Ottenberg, Washington City Paper

"A wonderful new book for anyone who is interested in the topic of emptying an extremely cluttered family home, especially for those who have not only a practical, but an intellectual interest in it. ... A delight to read."—Janet Hulstrand, Decluttering the Home

"This book is the primal scream of an only child.... [A] tidy little volume—certainly not one that would clutter up anyone’s bookish space. It’s the minimalistic story of one woman’s life and how her belongings came to be, merged with her daughter’s dilemma of what to do with it all, framed by the eternal question dating back to prehistoric times: How much stuff should I bring into my cave?"—Lanie Tankard, The Woven Tale Press

"Fascinating, meticulous and fittingly compact." —Judy Bolton-Fasman, Jewish Boston

"Blending her personal experience and her research, Howard creates an engaging narrative that is colored by her investment in understanding hoarding in all of its complexities."—Linda Levitt, PopMatters

From the Publisher

2020-06-30
A veteran journalist explores our messy lives.

In this illuminating sociological study, Howard, a former contributing editor and columnist for the Washington Post, begins with the discovery that her mother had been living for years in a hoarder’s den. “Squalor and chaos have infiltrated every room—upstairs, downstairs, attic, basement,” she writes. “No space has been left untouched.” Howard then delves into the sordid history of clutter, looking at the intriguing case study of Homer and Langley Collyer, whose Harlem brownstone, in the 1920s and ’30s, “became a death trap of neck-high junk, including hundreds of thousands of newspapers.” In 1947, Langley was crushed under the clutter; Homer, “blind and bedridden and dependent on his brother, starved to death.” The author also explores how industrialization helped create the birth of consumer culture as well as the complex psychology of overconsumption in modern-day capitalism. Howard’s research is thorough, and the prose is clear, well written, and inviting rather than being judgmental, even if she’s exploring complex issues such as activism, entrepreneurship, and the potential impact of clutter on the future of the planet. In addition to her historical narrative and contemporary analysis, the author includes commentary from a variety of interesting characters, including New Yorker and Kirkus Prize–winning cartoonist Roz Chast, British author Matt Haig (“there is, in the current world, an excess of everything”), and even Oscar Wilde: “Have nothing in your house that is not useful or beautiful; if such a rule were followed out, you would be astonished at the amount of rubbish you would get rid of.” Like George Carlin’s infamous riff on “A Place for My Stuff,” Howard’s exploration of one dark corner of consumer culture is quick-witted and insightful—and, appropriately for the subject, refreshingly concise. The author also discusses the phenomenon of the “mild-mannered Japanese organizing guru” Marie Kondo.

A keen assessment of one of society’s secret shames and its little-understood consequences.

Kirkus Reviews