The Interior Lives of Hoarders

In an attempt to mitigate my own discomfort, I’ve tried to find an episode that feels more helpful than sensational. I haven’t quite found one. Instead, I’ve found Laura from Season 3, a 47-year-old writer with Stage 4 colon cancer. Her husband, Wayne, a psychologist, has stood by her for 15 years, despite what he calls the “over-accumulation” of stuff in their home. Laura’s two daughters have had their lives upended by their mother’s hoarding: Stephanie, 20, and her young daughter have moved back in to care for Laura. Michelle, 23, struggles with her resentment toward her mother. “I’ve felt before that she chooses these things over me and my sister,” she says, and even if it’s more complicated than that, she isn’t wrong.

The TV cameras are not generous: They pan across black mold crawling like moss up the walls; they capture Stephanie’s toddler stumbling over boxes strewn on the floor; they land on dilapidated furniture and dust bunnies twice the size of actual bunnies. Laura’s A&E-appointed psychologist calls the house “probably the worst … I’ve ever been in, in terms of the smell.” The cleanup is almost unbearable to watch. At one point, the camera zooms in on Laura’s face as she cries in the kitchen; she is stricken with guilt for raising her children in this home. Laura is having what might be the worst day of her life, on national television. I’m lying in bed eating chocolate-covered almonds, watching.

I imagined that I’d cycle through the same revulsion, pity, and then shame while reading Kate Durbin’s new poetry collection, Hoarders. I suspected that it wouldn’t be able to avoid sensationalism and doubted that a series of poems could really say something new about hoarding. But Durbin’s work has what the A&E show lacks: a capacious sense of humanity, a nuanced understanding of how consumerism might shape compulsions, and a deeply expressed empathy for the subtleties of life under capitalism.

Durbin’s characters collect all manner of things: food, plants, books, dolls, novelties. Some of them are loosely inspired by the real-life people appearing in shows such as Hoarders, though Durbin’s fictionalized depictions grant them more freedom. In this reinvention, each character’s own narration takes precedence over the more salacious details of their disorder, bringing us into their personal, sometimes painful, worlds. Each poem consists of connected fragments, little piles. Each stanza reads like a conversation between the person and their stuff. In italics is the character’s inner world. Bleeding into it, unitalicized, is a catalog of objects. As if to say, This here is my wound, and that there is my elixir.

Take the first poem, “Marlena,” which follows a woman’s storybook romance to its downfall:

But after our daughter was born, my husband started dating other women secretly dozens of Louis Vuitton bags under the bed           

Connecting Marlena’s circumstances with the objects that weigh her down forces us to reevaluate both. Are the Louis Vuitton bags the symptom of a dissolving relationship? Is the relationship a symptom of a larger trauma? Rampant consumerism is everywhere in these poems, but the stuff is treated with tenderness—sometimes even anthropomorphized. A mother treats her childhood dolls almost as if she’s cradling a small, innocent part of herself:

In the kids’ rooms, I have a lot of storage of my dolls too two Bratz dolls huddled on a tiny bed; the pink haired one is holding herself as if she is cold; the other has green skin, a tattered shirt, and a leg brace; next to the Bratz is a their-size Christmas tree

The pink-haired Bratz doll holding herself is an embodied gesture; she might even have the capability to feel cold. (I’m reminded of the phenomenon of users naming their Roombas and then not being able to bear replacing them if they malfunctioned.) In some cases, Durbin doesn’t humanize objects so much as imbue them with a perpetual sense of possibility, as with the belongings of one couple, Noah and Allie, who are “omnivores for every kind of information”:

You can find a book about anything Crocheting for Dummies, Screenwriting for Dummies, Organic Chemistry for Dummies, British Sign Language for Dummies …

The pair are an outlier in the collection, because they’re able to bond over the magnitude of their stuff. A reader might almost forget that their hoarding was a problem, might even begin to see it as a sweet quirk. Of course, the outcome is just as dangerous: “Books behind the front door, collapsing.” Noah has a health condition and Allie knows that an EMT would have a hell of a time navigating through the piles and piles of books in an emergency.

The poems themselves are cluttered, yet their vibrancy is hard to overstate. Durbin astutely marries content and meaning, overwhelming the reader while dialing into our internal monstrous consumer. Why is swimming in this brand soup so exciting? I suppose because I recognize myself there, in a Luna-bar wrapper, a Safeway bag with shriveled lettuce, Drew Barrymore’s Home Collection. I know them all. A typical passage might feel anxiety-producing, disgusting, thrilling, or deeply relatable, sometimes all at once:

That was really when I started the snowball effect of all this collecting hundreds of Beanie Babies watching as she shops on eBay; Beanie Baby reindeer, Beanie Baby bat, Beanie Baby panda, Beanie Baby lemur, Beanie Baby snow leopard, Beanie Baby harp seal, Princess Diana Beanie Baby bear; inside the Beanie Babies, legs of smothered Barbies jut out into the air

As a kid of the ’90s, I feel an almost erotic desire reading this passage. I recall my Princess Diana Beanie, with small teeth marks on her heart-shaped tag, courtesy of my childhood dog. I cannot think of that baby without thinking of how I always wanted more, how I wanted all of the babies, piled into one of those above-the-bed stuffed-animal nets I’d seen advertised in Sears catalogs.