Hoarders by Kate Durbin

The hoarding got worse when I got stressed, when I was going through a marital separation I got emotionally attached to some stuff and I wouldn't let anybody throw away black funeral dress

When things are good I save the vacuum cleaner dust rows of jars and bottles with handwritten labels, all filled with dust

When things are going bad, I have this good moment set in time that I can sprinkle around, and it shifts the energy back to good mason jar filled with dust, labeled CHRISTMAS 2004

Kate Durbin's Hoarders presents fifteen character sketches, all of people who have appeared on the A&E program Hoarders. Each sketch is comprised of only two elements: lines spoken by the hoarder, and images of what is hoarded, sometimes complemented by images of the hoarder themselves. What sets the sketches apart is the way these two elements are combined, smashed together into a single line of poetry or something like it. Often Durbin will chop off the end of the line and let the item fill the gap, as if suggesting that the stuff is a kind of expression, filling in where words fail the hoarders, capturing the deep longings that drive them to hoard and which cannot in any other fashion be expressed. Sometimes this method results in brittle humor ("My daughter came in and said if you don't fix this I'm going to call the authorities, put grandma in pink Barbie lunch pail") and sometimes in deep pathos ("My hoarding has caused a terrible rift between me and my American Girl doll with a destroyed face").

With these scanty tools, it's impressive how Hoarders manages to produce in each sketch a unique portrait; the hoarders emerge as quite different from one another, both in their methods and their justifications. Noah and Allie are a couple whose co-dependence and bibliomania have filled their house with thousands of books; Chuck hoards his own paintings of his wife who left him; Gary hoards plants because "When I see things grow, I feel like God." Some of the sketches are incredibly unsettling, like that of Alice, unable to care for the dozens of cats she takes in--Durbin's camera pans to a kitten's corpse--or Hannah, whose apartment is literally covered in shit.

But Hoarders allows us to see also the patterns between the sketches. Many of the hoarders talk about unsuccessful relationships, their lives marred by jealousy and cruelty; the stuff they collect begins to seem like an attempt to create an attachment to things that will not abandon them. Many of them speak lucidly about their hoarding, admitting that it has damaged their relationships with other people, that it keeps them close to illness, poverty, danger. They are overwhelmed by their own compulsions, but helpless in the face of them. Many seem like victims of a particular American disease, the need to possess and consume.

The strangest thing about the book, perhaps, is that it's produced from watching a television show, rather than conducting interviews (which is sort of what I thought the case was before I looked it up). It makes one wonder whether the project reflects some of the prurience that seems inherent in the television show. One of the sketches is of Dorothy, from Towanda, Kansas; Dorothy collects videotapes of hundreds and hundreds television shows. The last line of her section is: "I couldn't possibly watch them all if I sat down and started." Reading the whole book in one sitting, like bingeing a whole season of Hoarders, made me wonder if the difference between her and the rest of us is less vast that