Published in 2020
192 pages
Jennifer Howard is a writer and journalist and the author of Clutter: An Untidy History, which Kirkus Reviews called “quick-witted and insightful… A keen assessment of one of society’s secret shames and its little-understood consequences.” Jen’s work has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the TLS, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Slate, and many other publications. Her fiction has been published in DC NOIR (edited by George Pelecanos), VQR, and elsewhere. She lives in Washington, DC with her family.
What is this book about?
“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.
