I loved having the chance to do a book launch event (safely, via Zoom) last month at my local indie on Capitol Hill, East City Bookshop, in conversation with Susan Coll. We ran out of time long before we ran out of things to talk about, and the Q&A was full of great questions and… Continue reading »
Blog
The TLS: “Coming Clean” (review)
In the TLS, writer Beejay Silcox writes about CLUTTER and “mess as an emotional and cultural problem”: “Neuroses and trauma may have helped to bury Howard’s mother in domestic rubble, but so did an insatiable, deep-rooted, and increasingly unsustainable, cultural hunger to own. ‘The chaos of my mother’s house, then, can be read as a… Continue reading »
Vox: Quoted in an article on “The New Maximalism”
I talked to Vox’s Rebecca Jennings about the Victorian roots of maximalism and the psychic toll of the recent mania for decluttering: Television shows like Hoarders, Tidying Up With Marie Kondo, and now The Home Edit, in which a team of organization experts traipse through the pantries of celebrities and explain the importance of color-coding one’s nut butters,… Continue reading »
The Guardian: Quoted in a feature on “Cluttercore”
Morwenna Ferrier, the Guardian‘s deputy fashion editor, talked to me for a feature on “Cluttercore: the pandemic trend for celebrating stuff, mess, and comfort”: Clutter has emerged, dusty and triumphant, as a defining byproduct of the pandemic. Yet we are undecided on what to do with it. “Forced inside, some people have been decluttering, absolutely,… Continue reading »
PAWcast: Jennifer Howard ’85 Explains the History of Clutter
PAWcast, Princeton Alumni Weekly’s podcast, has posted my conversation with associate editor Carrie Compton about the book and all things clutter-related: This month, Jennifer Howard ’85 discusses her book, Clutter: An Untidy History. Faced with the daunting task of cleaning out her elderly mother’s chaotic and jam-packed home, Howard began to ask herself about our relationship with… Continue reading »
