Lost in the Stacks: Destroy This House

As a child, Amanda dreamed of an empty house. A house without bedrooms filled floor to ceiling with fabric. A house without hallways stacked with bags of rotting groceries. A house without piles of unworn clothes, hundreds of cosmetics and sewing projects that never got done. In a house with just enough Amanda wouldn't feel shame or confusion about her parents' increasingly bizarre lifestyle.

Amanda’s empty house dreams persisted even after her family left their hoarded mansion in southern Indiana. The fabric, the food, the waste, the smell, the compulsive shopping, the poor decisions followed the Long family wherever they lived. Even worse, Amanda became aware that her parents didn’t pay service bills, didn’t file taxes and didn’t believe in house repairs.

In her exceptional memoir Destroy This House Amanda Uhle struggles to understand why her mother and father, intelligent and hardworking - her father an inventor turned pastor, her mother a nurse - choose such self-defeating behavior.  Even more, Amanda wonders why her parents expected Amanda to fix the unfixable.