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theinkwyrm's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
informative
sad
medium-paced
4.0
This is one of those non-fiction books that feels like fiction because of how easy it is to read. I enjoyed my time in this book and found the subject quite interesting. However, I think this could have done with some editing to focus it more precisely on hoarding. The sections that actually dealt with this topic were fascinating (and sometimes frustrating), but Sholl does go off on a few rabbit trails about her life that didn’t really add much to the narrative other than giving some context about what she was dealing with at the time. They weren’t so bad that they detracted from my enjoyment, but they were small things that could have been fixed to make this even better.
justlily's review against another edition
I really wanted to like this but I couldn't get beyond how snotty, rude, and unlikable the narrator is. From what I did read very little was about the mother, it was mostly the daughter whining. There's way to have written it that would have worked but this didn't.
90sinmyheart's review against another edition
5.0
I find the shows Hoarders and Hoarding: Buried Alive fascinating, but I know they are carefully produced and constructed to fit into a one-hour TV timeslot. This delved much deeper into the past and recent history of a family affected by hoarding. Really awesome read.
awillis506's review against another edition
Heartwrenching and eyeopening look into the life of a child of a hoarder.
mldias's review against another edition
4.0
Hoarding. A psychological phenomenon that has quickly become part of our cultural vocabulary. A mental illness that, if unchecked, can leave people homeless and friendless.
Unless you've had your head in the sand for the last two years, you've seen instances of this devastating disorder in the media. Both A&E and TLC air documentary-style reality shows featuring afflicted families, and various talk shows have devoted entire episodes to hoarding. However, as Jessie Sholl reveals in her memoir, Dirty Secret: A Daughter Comes Clean About Her Mother's Compulsive Hoarding (Gallery Books, December 2010), this phenomenon is hardly a new one.
Books like Stuff (written by psychologists Randy Frost and Gail Steketee) examine the psychopathology of hoarding, drawing upon anecdotal material to illustrate its hallmark traits. Hoarding disorders can be slippery diagnostic eels, often comorbid with a host of other emotional disorders and untraceable to a single cause. They hit different people differently and for different reasons. Books like Sholl's illuminate just how complex this illness can be.
What makes Dirty Secret so unique is its point of view. This is not the memoir of a hoarder, nor is it the clinical reflection of a hoarding specialist. It isn't a book of tips for conquering hoarding behaviors or chronic disorganization. No, Dirty Secret tells us what it is like to be the loved one of a hoarder. The relationships between hoarders and their loved ones are often, for lack of a better word, messy. As Sholl tells us, hoarders are prone to lapses in decision-making and deficits in memory and spatial orientation. Sholl herself is the victim of poor decision-making: Her mother did not hold her until she was six months old because she was recovering from surgery; however, even after her recovery, the sight of her crying baby filled her with such crippling indecision that she often declined to hold her. She did not know how to react to her crying child then, and she does not know how to react to the gargantuan heaps of junk that threaten her well-being now.
Like a lot of hoarders, Jessie's mother has always had big plans for her "stuff." She collects items indiscriminately to give as gifts to loved ones. She has grandiose plans to get rich crafting cat beds. Despite having written down Jessie's contact information several times, she must always ask for her address again when sending one of her "gifts." And it is the gifts to Jessie that illuminate just how warped a hoarder's mind can become. As a child, Jessie had a traumatic experience at a zoo with a snake. Her mother's immediate response was to laugh while her child screamed. This is troubling enough. But over the years, she would collect toy snakes from various places and give them to Jessie as gag gifts, despite her daughter's snake phobia. She persists in doing so even after being told to stop several times by an unnerved Jessie.
The thing is, her mother's behaviors are so varied, ranging from confusion to bad decision-making to hoarding to obsessive compulsion to avoidance to delusions of grandeur (e.g., the cat beds), that it is hard to blame just the hoarding disorder. There appear to be a host of comorbid problems in play here. This, of course, makes it exceedingly difficult to treat hoarders like her and virtually impossible to cure them.
Jessie's narrative reveals the frustration, fear, and despair associated with her mother's hoarding. It also explores her struggle with RSI (repetitive stress injury), a disorder that made writing impossible for a long stretch.
Dirty Secret: A Daughter Comes Clean About Her Mother's Compulsive Hoarding offers the American public a rare opportunity to experience hoarding from the point of view of a loved one. While the television documentaries give ample airtime to the loved ones, it isn't until we read a memoir like this that we understand just how crippling this disorder can be. Long after the junk trucks leave with their spoils, hoarders and their family members must still dig out from under years of accumulated hurt and resentment. Lifelong behaviors and habits must change. Television viewers glean satisfaction from the before/after shots of these once uninhabitable homes, but they shouldn't forget that, at this stage, the family's work has only just begun.
[Disclaimer: I received an advance review copy of Dirty Secret from the author/publisher.]
Unless you've had your head in the sand for the last two years, you've seen instances of this devastating disorder in the media. Both A&E and TLC air documentary-style reality shows featuring afflicted families, and various talk shows have devoted entire episodes to hoarding. However, as Jessie Sholl reveals in her memoir, Dirty Secret: A Daughter Comes Clean About Her Mother's Compulsive Hoarding (Gallery Books, December 2010), this phenomenon is hardly a new one.
Books like Stuff (written by psychologists Randy Frost and Gail Steketee) examine the psychopathology of hoarding, drawing upon anecdotal material to illustrate its hallmark traits. Hoarding disorders can be slippery diagnostic eels, often comorbid with a host of other emotional disorders and untraceable to a single cause. They hit different people differently and for different reasons. Books like Sholl's illuminate just how complex this illness can be.
What makes Dirty Secret so unique is its point of view. This is not the memoir of a hoarder, nor is it the clinical reflection of a hoarding specialist. It isn't a book of tips for conquering hoarding behaviors or chronic disorganization. No, Dirty Secret tells us what it is like to be the loved one of a hoarder. The relationships between hoarders and their loved ones are often, for lack of a better word, messy. As Sholl tells us, hoarders are prone to lapses in decision-making and deficits in memory and spatial orientation. Sholl herself is the victim of poor decision-making: Her mother did not hold her until she was six months old because she was recovering from surgery; however, even after her recovery, the sight of her crying baby filled her with such crippling indecision that she often declined to hold her. She did not know how to react to her crying child then, and she does not know how to react to the gargantuan heaps of junk that threaten her well-being now.
Like a lot of hoarders, Jessie's mother has always had big plans for her "stuff." She collects items indiscriminately to give as gifts to loved ones. She has grandiose plans to get rich crafting cat beds. Despite having written down Jessie's contact information several times, she must always ask for her address again when sending one of her "gifts." And it is the gifts to Jessie that illuminate just how warped a hoarder's mind can become. As a child, Jessie had a traumatic experience at a zoo with a snake. Her mother's immediate response was to laugh while her child screamed. This is troubling enough. But over the years, she would collect toy snakes from various places and give them to Jessie as gag gifts, despite her daughter's snake phobia. She persists in doing so even after being told to stop several times by an unnerved Jessie.
The thing is, her mother's behaviors are so varied, ranging from confusion to bad decision-making to hoarding to obsessive compulsion to avoidance to delusions of grandeur (e.g., the cat beds), that it is hard to blame just the hoarding disorder. There appear to be a host of comorbid problems in play here. This, of course, makes it exceedingly difficult to treat hoarders like her and virtually impossible to cure them.
Jessie's narrative reveals the frustration, fear, and despair associated with her mother's hoarding. It also explores her struggle with RSI (repetitive stress injury), a disorder that made writing impossible for a long stretch.
Dirty Secret: A Daughter Comes Clean About Her Mother's Compulsive Hoarding offers the American public a rare opportunity to experience hoarding from the point of view of a loved one. While the television documentaries give ample airtime to the loved ones, it isn't until we read a memoir like this that we understand just how crippling this disorder can be. Long after the junk trucks leave with their spoils, hoarders and their family members must still dig out from under years of accumulated hurt and resentment. Lifelong behaviors and habits must change. Television viewers glean satisfaction from the before/after shots of these once uninhabitable homes, but they shouldn't forget that, at this stage, the family's work has only just begun.
[Disclaimer: I received an advance review copy of Dirty Secret from the author/publisher.]
meghan111's review against another edition
3.0
Above all, this book will make you paranoid about scabies, and no longer will you thoughtlessly grab a communal blanket, pillow or mat at your yoga class. A lucid, readable memoir of growing up with a mentally ill parent, this is less about the process of cleaning up a hoarder's house and more focused on hoarding as a mental illness, and what it's like when your mom is mentally ill, abusive, and delusional.
There are a few dark places, even though the author seems mostly happy in her adult life. In one, she talks about the process of adopting her small dog from someone she now thinks could have been an animal hoarder - 'abused dog learning to trust again' storylines are awfully heartbreaking. In the other, her normal parent - her dad - is recovering from a heart attack and she has flown in to help take care of him for a few weeks. When he collapses again in front of her, she agonizingly describes exactly what I believe it would be like if I thought my parent was dying in front of me: she calls 911 but can't articulate clearly, then panic and worry cause her to black out.
There are a few dark places, even though the author seems mostly happy in her adult life. In one, she talks about the process of adopting her small dog from someone she now thinks could have been an animal hoarder - 'abused dog learning to trust again' storylines are awfully heartbreaking. In the other, her normal parent - her dad - is recovering from a heart attack and she has flown in to help take care of him for a few weeks. When he collapses again in front of her, she agonizingly describes exactly what I believe it would be like if I thought my parent was dying in front of me: she calls 911 but can't articulate clearly, then panic and worry cause her to black out.
ewg109's review against another edition
3.0
This is terrible to say, but I just found Jessie Sholl kind of whiny.
That is all.
That is all.
thejoyofbooking's review against another edition
4.0
This was a tough book to read. Jessie's story is heartbreaking, infuriating, and tragic. Luckily, she tells it with a toughness and honesty that makes it hard to put down. It's an eye-opening look at mental illness from the point of view of someone who faced it firsthand from before she was old enough to protect herself against it, and from the point of view of an adult stepping in to care for a parent.
Jessie's voice is heartfelt and caring, even when sharing unsavory stories. I applaud her bravery in telling her story. Saying I enjoyed Dirty Secret isn't exactly the right phrase - like I said, it's a tough book to read. But I felt that the story was valuable and important, and that from one person's tale I learned a lot about the world. If you know a hoarder, or if you'd like to know what goes on behind the scenes of a reality show, in the lives of the family members of a hoarder, this is a great place to start.
Jessie's voice is heartfelt and caring, even when sharing unsavory stories. I applaud her bravery in telling her story. Saying I enjoyed Dirty Secret isn't exactly the right phrase - like I said, it's a tough book to read. But I felt that the story was valuable and important, and that from one person's tale I learned a lot about the world. If you know a hoarder, or if you'd like to know what goes on behind the scenes of a reality show, in the lives of the family members of a hoarder, this is a great place to start.
wenwe's review against another edition
3.0
Read an Advance Uncorrected Proof of this. Fascinating look into hoarding mentality and psychological impacts on selves and people around. This version (can't speak to whether this was "corrected") was disjointed. Non-storyline left some things unexplained things hanging out there for the author/main... what about the brother? But perhaps that is a whole 'nother story.