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Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things
Houghton Mifflin
May 2010
On Sale: April 20, 2010
304 pages
ISBN: 015101423X
EAN: 9780151014231
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
What possesses someone to save every scrap of paper that’s
ever come into his home? What compulsions drive a woman like
Irene, whose hoarding cost her her marriage? Or Ralph, whose
imagined uses for castoff items like leaky old buckets
almost lost him his house? Randy Frost and Gail Steketee were the first to study
hoarding when they began their work a decade ago; they
expected to find a few sufferers but ended up treating
hundreds of patients and fielding thousands of calls from
the families of others. Now they explore the compulsion
through a series of compelling case studies in the vein of
Oliver Sacks. With vivid portraits that show us the traits
by which you can identify a hoarder—piles on sofas and beds
that make the furniture useless, houses that can be
navigated only by following small paths called goat trails,
vast piles of paper that the hoarders “churn” but never
discard, even collections of animals and garbage—Frost and
Steketee illuminate the pull that possessions exert on all
of us. Whether we’re savers, collectors, or compulsive cleaners,
very few of us are in fact free of the impulses that
drive hoarders to the extremes in which they live. For all of us with complicated relationships to
our things, Stuffanswers the question of what happens
when our stuff starts to own us.
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