March 28, 2024

Jon Day · Diary: Hoardiculture · LRB 8 September 2022 – London Review of Books

When​ Possessed, Rebecca Falkoff’s cultural history of hoarding, came through the letter box, I put it on my desk next to a pile of other books, a tangle of wires left out after an unsuccessful search for a phone charger, a small pocket microscope, a broken reading light, a carrier bag full of travel adapters, a sheaf of loose papers, a selection of penknives, a pair of speakers, the jawbone of a pike, an ancient box of cigars, a blown pigeon egg, a spool of fishing line, several harmonic…….

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When​ Possessed, Rebecca Falkoff’s cultural history of hoarding, came through the letter box, I put it on my desk next to a pile of other books, a tangle of wires left out after an unsuccessful search for a phone charger, a small pocket microscope, a broken reading light, a carrier bag full of travel adapters, a sheaf of loose papers, a selection of penknives, a pair of speakers, the jawbone of a pike, an ancient box of cigars, a blown pigeon egg, a spool of fishing line, several harmonicas, a roll of solder, a broken toy steam engine, the shell of a sea urchin, the tail feather of a ring-necked parakeet, a transparent padlock for practising lockpicking, three empty mugs and a shrivelled apple core.

Clutter Image Rating, living room

Falkoff’s book led me to others. I didn’t think I could start writing until I had read a few more histories of hoarding (Stuff by Randy Frost and Gail Steketee, Clutter by Jennifer Howard) and books about the way to treat it (The Hoarding Handbook, CBT for Hoarding Disorder). I wanted to understand the allure of decluttering, so I bought The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying by Marie Kondo and Decluttering at the Speed of Life by Dana White. I sought out novels and short stories that feature hoarders (Gogol’s Dead Souls, in which Stepan Plyushkin ‘fishes’ in his village for worthless things; Virginia Woolf’s ‘Solid Objects’, in which a young man gives up a promising parliamentary career so he can walk around London in search of beautiful shards of pottery) and printed off academic articles in which psychiatrists argued over definitions. For months, the books and papers kept accumulating. I’d shuffle the pile around, read a chapter, underline things, attach a Post-it note. The pile got taller. The pile got dustier.

Pathological hoarding is surprisingly common, affecting between 2 and 6 per cent of people (with equal numbers of women and men), and surprisingly difficult to define. Since diagnosis is based on visual assessment, it can always be contested, which means that hoarding – as Falkoff points out in her fascinating book – is always in part ‘an aesthetic problem’. One solution is the Clutter Image Rating (2008), a diagnostic tool designed by Frost and Steketee to replace vague self-definitions of hoarding with a more objective measure. The CIR consists of images of different interiors – kitchen, bedroom, living room – which are progressively filled with objects. In the first picture of the living room the space is more or less empty. You can make out the floor, the surface of a coffee table under a neat pile of …….

Source: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n17/jon-day/diary