Another book I borrowed from Badkittyuno but somehow managed to write my review first. This means I get to tell you about our Uncle Frank before she does too.
When I was about 10 my family and I went up to Chicago; my uncle had fallen, he never had people over and all our family had migrated out of Illinois years ago- it was his dog who woke him up. While he was in the hospital my parents had to clean his house, the house my dad grew up in, from the piles of garbage he owned. I don’t know if I’d say he is a hoarder, at least not at the level of intensity Kimberly Rae Miller’s father is, but he definitely has hoarding tendencies. He has trashed 2 apartments since moving down to Texas to be closer to my parents and as he makes plans to move into a senior living apartment complex my mother makes plans to spend a few hours a day over the following two weeks to make his current apartment passable. He is a slob who is also an artist, he sees treasure is trash and therefore nothing gets thrown away because he may be able to create something from it. But really he is just a slob and my grandmother was the same way.
I should mention my mother’s side of the family is chock full of OCD nut jobs; combine that with a severe lack of sentimentality and I throw shit away on the regular
Coming Clean is horrifying. I can’t imagine growing up the way Miller did and there were several anecdotes that broke my heart.
Raised in a home with stacks of paper, broken electronics and various other collections Kimberly Rae knew her family was a little bit different. It took a visit from CPS for her to realize just how different; from that young age she made a promise to never share her family’s lifestyle to anyone else. Even when she had a word for it, hoarding she could never find a cure for her father’s need to collect trash. Miller chronicles her unique childhood, her college-aged attempts to break free from her parent’s home, and her neat-freak adulthood in a gripping memoir that took a lot of courage for her to write. She hid her parents’ hoarding habits throughout her college years, and even when she opened up it was only to a few close friends. She is brutally honest about her feelings, she had a lot of shame growing up. She hid her house from her friends, she never opened the curtains in case someone could see inside or opened the door to strangers for the same reason. Her mother told her that there was a chance she could be taken away and that terrified her. She is honest that there were times she hated her parents for doing this to her; especially after her mother started adding to the growing piles of “paper” and whenever they trashed a home after she de-trashed it only months prior. Miller also chronicles her mother’s health struggles and the fear she had that the piles of trash would impede her mother’s recovery following spinal surgery. It was a big turning point in Miller opening up to her friends about her family and asking for help.
Like I said this is a heartbreaking memoir that you can’t put down, I wish I had started it before 9pm last night because it was almost impossible to put down and my husband insisted we go to bed before midnight.
