TWO BOOKS FROM CHILDREN OF HOARDERS
I. Coming Clean: A Memoir, by Kimberly Rae Miller
Every night before I went to sleep…[I asked] for the things I wanted most in life: new dolls, a best friend, and for my house to burn down. Kimberly Rae Miller
When Miller’s childhood house actually did burn down, she would find out that her father’s hoarding didn’t vanish along with it. The book’s publisher: “In this moving coming-of-age story, Kim brings to life her rat-infested home, her childhood consumed by concealing her father’s shameful secret from friends, and the emotional burden that ultimately led to an attempt to take her own life. And in beautiful prose, Miller sheds light on her complicated yet loving relationship with her parents that has thrived in spite of the odds.”
The adult writer/actress Miller, author of the new book Coming Clean: A Memoir, eventually realized she needed therapy to deal with the effects of her childhood. Her realization came after she destroyed her box springs in a frantic attempt to root out the (nonexistent) bedbugs causing her itchy discomfort.
The Publishers Weekly review:
As a child Miller realized her family wasn’t like other people’s families with tidy, presentable homes; far from it. A fire destroyed one home when she was in second grade, while the large house they moved into was soon rendered similarly uninhabitable, so that Miller never invited anyone home and had to adopt a ‘decoy’ house to be dropped off at by friends. Eventually she went to college at Emerson in Boston where she kept a clean living space, as she did when she later moved to L.A. and New York City. The reader senses in this horrific story that Miller is still tiptoeing around her family’s dirty secret and hardly revealing the half of it.
II. Dirty Secret: A Daughter Comes Clean About Her Mother’s Compulsive Hoarding, Jessie Sholl
The more I talked about my mother’s compulsive hoarding, the weaker my secret became. Until it was gone. Jessie Sholl
Sholl’s book Dirty Secret: A Daughter Comes Clean About Her Mother’s Compulsive Hoardingcame out in 2010, when the issue wasn’t yet widely known.
In an interview at the time with Rebecca Cramer, Kirkus Reviews, Sholl explains a significant turning point in her processing of the experience: she learned “that there’s actually a chemical basis for hoarding. It shows up in brain scans of hoarders that their metabolic activity rates in the parts of the brain that have to do with emotion and decision-making and memory are slower. Just knowing that helped a lot because it made me realize that this is a disease. It’s similar to schizophrenia or even cancer.”
Fugen Neziroglu, Ph.D., co-author of Overcoming Compulsive Hoarding: Why You Save and How You Can Stop, reviews this book:”Suspenseful and novel-like, Dirty Secret is a wonderful, respectful introduction to the world of a hoarder and the tribulations suffered by both the individual who hoards and their family members.”
***For more info about this topic check out the site Children of Hoarders.
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