story was so clearly emotional for the author to write, very upsetting to read at times, and absolutely BANANAS, My heart hurts for this woman's childhood, but I was glad to read of the progress her family has made at the end.
Just, whew. It is a ride. A stunning memoir about a childhood spent growing up in a family of extreme hoarders and hiding squalor behind the veneer of a perfect family.
Kim Miller is an immaculately puttogether woman with a great career, a loving boyfriend, and a beautifully tidy apartment in Brooklyn, You would never guess that she spent her childhood hiding behind the closed doors of her familys idyllic Long Island house, navigating between teetering stacks of aging newspaper, broken computers, and boxes upon boxes of unused junk festering in every roomthe product of her fathers painful and unending struggle with hoarding.
In this comingofage story, Kim brings to life her experience of growing up in a ratinfested home, concealing her fathers shameful secret from friends for years, and of 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.
Coming Clean is a story about recognizing where we come from and the relationships that define usand about finding peace in the homes we make for ourselves.
This book offers a factual account of what it is like as a child growing up with parents who are hoarders, Made me very interested in the topic of hoarding and why people do it I actually researched it a little while reading this book.
My conclusions are mostly because they are a little bit ADHD, OCD, easily overwhelmed, messed up in the head and, . . lazy The editors of the DSM are looking to include hoarding as a personality disorder, The way Miller writes her parents, there is definitely something disturbing going on, and while her parents demonstrate varying levels of awareness, it does not seem to be bothering them much or rendering them uncomfortable.
Growing up like this is, on the other hand, extremely disturbing to our author and she shares very detailed struggles she faces as she tries to compensate and care for her parents.
While her love for her parents is everpresent and magnanimous almost to the point of sugarcoating the deeper, more disturbing issues of raising their only child in squalor, she wishes they would just tidy up and stop depending on her to do it for them, even after she has left home.
This made me question how far I would go to appease parents that don't seem to care for themselves or, really,for me.
While Miller is angry, she still meets their beck and call, and keeps getting angrier, . . which leads me to to the thought that there could be a rest of the story later on as they all grow older.
The book/writing itself has troubles, The tenses change often. I don't think that should be allowed just because of its genre, There is one major part that appears completely unedited, with Miller's rambling thoughts perhaps after a few glasses of sangria, that she has difficulty shaping into some semblance of her true beliefs.
Moreover, Miller holds back. Because her parents are both still alive and relatively well, she tries to be as honest as possible, but we do not get the darker side of the picture because she is still annoyingly trying to please them and demonstrate her hard story with a light touch that doesn't work.
Her early descriptions of herself being precious and precocious as a child hit the reader way too hard over the headokay, we get it, you were cute and smart.
The list fashion her story is told, . . " and then we and then I and then they, . . " helps us know she was not sure what to leave out and keep in, This makes the book rather ineffective as a memoir into the true depths of hoarding hell, I don't understand what was going through her mind as she tried taking her life and I am not sure she does either.
She knows it is bad, though, I don't understand why her parents do what they do, I know it is bad, though, Because she said so.
While this memoir which seems almost selfpublished/edited touches on important issues, it gives us little to go on, revealing a startling lack of insight on behalf of the author, who never notably received any therapeutic help, herself, as part of being a victim in a hoarding household.
Part contrived as a factbased expose, the writing is simply going through the motions, It may have been better to keep it under wraps as her personal story/journal than to expose it to the world without more emotive depth, until there is a deeper, even more painful but honest story to tell.
Incidentally, there is a creepy, creepy part that sticks with one after finding it out, If it were me, I would have started there and built my story around it with some added drama and tension, . . maybe in novel form. For what it's worth.
This memoir, written by Kimberly Rae Miller, was a 'mixed bag' for me! Ms, Miller wrote this memoir about growing up with a hoarder, . her father. It seemed to me that writing about her life with her parents was a sort of therapy for her and I could understand her need to do that.
Throughout the book, she related her feelings of shame and embarrassment over living in the way she was forced to live, She wrote of almost needing to live two parallel lives while growing up, . . one life at school, where she pretended she had a 'typical' family and was living the the type of lives her peers were living.
In her other life at home with her parents, she lived with stacks of paper,
broken electronics, spoiled food and unopened boxes from her mother's obsession with online shopping.
. buying things she didn't need or want but never returning them, . . all of these things were literally stacked to the ceilings and covering nearly every inch of the furniture, Yes, her father was the initial hoarder in the household, . . but her mother. . after feeling angry, frustrated and despairing over not being able to change her circumstances, . . seemed to develop an 'if you can't beat him, join him' attitude, And it really became impossible from that point on to determine which parent was the bigger hoarder,
At the beginning of the book, I felt a great deal of sympathy for Kimberly, . I could feel her mortification, . . and I was as angry and frustrated with her parents as she seemed to be, These two adults could just not seem to get their acts together and although I understand that this is a genuine mental disorder, it started to feel to me that they were not even attempting to deal with their problems.
They seemed to actually be enabling each other, Kimberly's mother blamed her husband for the complete mess and disaster that had been created and Kimberly's father often just 'hung his head' as if he were a young child being scolded.
Meanwhile, the two of them had created a situation in which their daughter had to hide her entire life from everyone, . . spending as much time as she could at friends' homes and having to join a gym so she could shower as a plumbing problem could not be addressed because they were unable to allow anyone into the home because he would discover the way they were living.
I can usually feel a great deal of compassion for people dealing with problems but in this case, all I could feel was frustration with these two supposed adults and the horrible position they had placed their daughter.
By the latter part of the book, I must have become as used to the mess that had become their lives as Kimberly was.
My anger had dissipated and I felt as if I, like Kimberly, was just looking forward to the day she could leave their home and start her own life over.
Fortunately, Kimberly DID manage to go to college , get a job and obtain her own apartment, When I read that she needed to read the directions for usage on the backs of cleaning solvents because she had no idea how to clean her apartment, I was very saddened.
Perhaps at this point, you are thinking that life only got better for Kimberly at this point, Or perhaps you are wondering what happened to her parents, The reality is that, although Kimberly was trying to make a new start in her life, . one free of filth and trash, she was constantly pulled back into her parents' messy lives, . . out of love. . or guilt. . or maybe a combination of the two, I found myself marveling at the number of times her parents just abandoned homes and apartments and moved, . to supposedly start over. I found myself wondering what the total cost of all those moves would be! With each move, Kimberly was manipulated in my view by her mother's pleading and her tears to clean out the horrific mess her parents had made so the two of them could supposedly get a fresh start in yet another place.
In case you haven't figure it out by now, that fresh start never lasted and the three of them kept repeating the cycle over and over.
Kimberly DID have a life of her own now, . . a job, an apartment and a relationship with a nice guy but she continued to enable her parents' behavior, . never forcing them to take responsibility for their actions,
This story was frustrating , infuriating and in the end, just completely exhausting for me to read, I suppose some people may come away from it thinking that at least Kimberly has a more stable life, Me . well, I have a different opinion, Kimberly finally came to the conclusion that her parents have no ability to change their promises to her are false and she realizes and accepts that she is going to continue to clean up and bail them out.
until the day comes that they pass away, . at which point, she will be cleaning up the mess for the last time, Sadly, i believe she is right, . . her parents cannot and will not help themselvesthey are the children in the relationship and Kimberly has always been the adult,
This was a very depressing story but seemed like a pretty realistic depiction of hoarding, .