{ tHE MESS HE MADE}
or unopened mail. ¶ Living alone made matters worse. When I was in graduate school, burglars stole a laptop from my apart- ment. The detectives, two women who reminded me of Cagney and Lacey, took only a few seconds to offer their first investigative finding: “Wow, your place really got ransacked.” I explained that nothing in the apartment had been touched, including stacks of several years’ worth of newspapers, and that I hadn’t cleaned up because I had wanted to preserve fingerprint evidence. ¶ There was silence. Then one of the detectives said, “We’re calling your mother.” ¶ I said, “She knows.” ¶ You may be surprised to learn that I am married. I should confess that my wife, Megan, was not briefed on any of these tales when we first met in Boston, and I made sure she didn’t learn of my special qualities until I had charmed her extensively. “I felt you kind of deceived me when we first met,” she told me recently. “You had your car profession- ally cleaned, a friend picked out your clothes, and you even hired a maid to clean your apartment before I came over the first time.”
throwing things away, but, really, I just hide stuff in other places. “How strong is your urge to save
something you know you may never use?” Before leaving Boston in 2004, I found a box of unopened mail — cat- alogues, flyers, bills and letters from collection agencies — dating to 1993. I totaled my answers to the test’s 15
questions. My clutter score qualified as “severe.” My “difficulty discarding” score qualified as “severe.” My “acquir- ing” score qualified as “severe.” I looked up in the direction of our dining room table and thought, Uh-oh.
For reasons I still can’t totally explain,
she not only agreed to move with me to Maryland a few years later but also said yes, without a twitch, when I proposed. Still, she wondered. “I remember
going through your books before we moved,” she said, “and finding two or three copies of the same book. Who does that?” Megan’s question led me to confront
myself: Am I, as she puts it, the laziest, most nauseating slob in modern U.S. history? Or is something else going on — something more complicated? Am I a hoarder?
LIKE most pEopLE, whEn I thInK of hoarding, the images that come to mind are the horrific scenes of uninhabitable homes that enter our living rooms dur- ing Sweeps Week. We watch these TV tales in the same way that we slow down for multiple-vehicle pileups on the Belt- way. A couple of years ago, in an episode titled “Inside the Secret Lives of Hoard- ers,” Oprah Winfrey visited a Rockville couple whose 3,000-square-foot home was overflowing with 75 tons of garbage. I went looking for the clips the other day on Oprah’s Web site, and the page about the show shouted, “Uncover what’s be- hind a hoarder’s closed doors!” I felt my stomach turn. The exclamation point, to me, screamed: “Freak show here. Step
right up.” For many Americans, these are hoarders, no further details needed. But as I now know, that’s not the whole story. After soliciting recollections of my
slobbiness from friends and family, I looked into the scholarship on disorga- nization and hoarding. The first book I came across was co-authored by Randy Frost, the world’s foremost hoarding ex- pert. Titled “Buried in Treasures: Help for Compulsive Acquiring, Saving, and Hoarding,” the book prompted a double take from the cashier when I paid for it at Barnes & Noble. Usually, I don’t ask for a bag. This time, I did. The book includes a questionnaire
Frost devised to identify hoarders. Re- clining in my living room La-Z-Boy, I pulled out one of my favorite fountain pens and took the test. (I have hundreds of fancy pens, vastly more than I could ever use.) One question was: “How much does clutter in your home interfere with your social, work or everyday function- ing? Think about things you don’t do because of clutter.” Our dining room table and its chairs are totally covered with my piles of papers and at least a dozen bottles of fountain pen ink, so the idea of having people over for dinner or even to watch a football game is rather exotic. Another question: “To what extent
do you have difficulty throwing things away?” Answer: I tell my wife I am
14 The WashingTon PosT Magazine | June 13, 2010
frost has a cornEr offIcE In thE humanities building on the campus of Smith College, a women’s school in Northampton, Mass. He invited me to visit so I could be psychologically dissected in his advanced seminar on hoarding. I was to be the guest specimen. When I arrived, he was straightening his desk, which was already tidy. Frost is 6-foot-5, built like a basketball forward, with a tightly groomed mustache and much less than a full head of hair. He is charming and soft-spoken, two quali- ties that probably ingratiate him well to the thousands of hoarders whose homes he has visited for his studies. Frost came to Smith in 1977 to teach
abnormal psychology, but it wasn’t until 1991 that he stumbled on hoarding. A student was discussing ideas for her term paper. She wondered about people who could not throw things away. Could she write her paper on this topic? Frost did not think the behavior, while abnormal, was widespread enough to justify a term paper. “Hoarding is something you don’t see very often, and there is no literature on it,” he said to her. But the student persisted. She mentioned the Collyer brothers, the infamous pair who died under 130 tons of junk in their tiny Man- hattan apartment — they are the subject of a new novel by E.L. Doctorow — and how her mother often told her to “clean up your room so you don’t end up like the Collyer brothers.” Frost told his student to place an ad
in the newspaper to see if any hoarders might help her with firsthand accounts. He expected a few calls. They got 100. “It’s been like a runaway train since
PREVIOUS PAGE: PHOTOGRAPH OF THE AUTHOR’S FACE BY MICHAEL NORTHRUP
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