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Mess: One Man's Struggle to Clean Up His House and His Act

Review

Mess: One Man's Struggle to Clean Up His House and His Act

Perhaps millions of Americans exhibit hoarding behavior: the compulsive need to acquire coupled with the inability to discard. As we know from several reality television sensations, hoarding is a serious and potentially devastating problem, whether one is holding on to too many treasured items, garbage or animals. In the most extreme examples, apartments or houses are full and all but uninhabitable, and the mental and physical health of anyone in the home is compromised.

Writer Barry Yourgrau, like so many Americans, had trouble getting rid of stuff. His own New York apartment was full of souvenirs from his travels, paper of all sorts, and unpacked boxes containing family items too painful to sort. He downplayed his hoarding through clever language and justification, calling his hoard his “lair” or “archives,” but struggled to throw away a single broken bowl. When his girlfriend, whose apartment he had filled with his hoard, issued him an ultimatum, he decided to record his journey and his process. The result is the engaging memoir MESS: One Man's Struggle to Clean Up His House and His Act.

"MESS is full of poignant and personal observations and realizations about identity, value, memory and letting go."

By all accounts, Yourgrau's hoarding was merely moderate, but that didn't mean it didn't affect him and his relationships. His girlfriend's frustration and worry helped propel him towards de-cluttering and an understanding of what drove him to collect, save and hoard in the first place. His efforts, though well intentioned, are never easy; even clearing off the overburdened shelf by the front door proves difficult as he is attached to many of the items stacked on it and is too easily distracted to finish the job. The cleanup, which culminates in hosting his girlfriend and her mother for dinner, takes a very long time and is not yet complete by the end of the book. However, in that time, Yourgrau explores not just his own attachment to the things he has collected and saved, but also hoarding in general and his relationship with his father. He is honest in questioning his own motives as he swings between investigator and subject.

Yourgrau attempts to romanticize the disorder by cataloging literary figures who were or wrote about hoarders, such as Balzac, Dickens, Dante and Gogol. Infamous hoarders like the Collyer brothers and celebrity hoarders like England's Richard Wallace are found here as well. A passionate traveler, Yourgrau goes from his own Queens to the Harlem site of the Collyer mansion and to Wallace's “notorious bungalow,” from museums to libraries to private residents, always returning to his own hoard to continue his cleanup efforts. Many experts are consulted, and several meetings of Clutterers Anonymous are attended.

MESS is full of poignant and personal observations and realizations about identity, value, memory and letting go. Yourgrau is a funny and charming host to this tour of hoards and the people who have created them as he tries to understand why. Underneath his girlfriend's piano, covered up and hidden away, are the boxes he has been avoiding for decades; inside are the relics of his father's life and his family's history. Finally opening them is like opening a Pandora's Box: Yourgrau not only confronts his conflicted and complicated feelings for his father, but also learns that much of what he thought he knew about him may not have been true.

This strand of MESS underpins much of the rest of the story but is a topic worthy of its own book and remains unresolved here. In fact, this is not a book about resolution at all but about progress and reflection, struggle and introspection. It is an entertaining read on a serious and fascinating topic.

Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman on August 21, 2015

Mess: One Man's Struggle to Clean Up His House and His Act
by Barry Yourgrau

  • Publication Date: August 2, 2016
  • Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction
  • Paperback: 288 pages
  • Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
  • ISBN-10: 0393352900
  • ISBN-13: 9780393352900