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
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.
