Hoarding: Lessons For The Writer

I’ve been thinking about “enough.” In our evolving bodies—many thousands of years behind the actual circumstances of our lives—we have not yet learned the word “enough.” We think that we must eat what we see, because who knows when the next meal will come or from where? This has a relevance to nonfiction story-telling that I have learned the hard way.

The art of non-fiction is the art of enough. Selection of material is the key hard task. This belongs; this is for another book, a different story. Yet it all happened, and much of it is interesting and any of it could have impacted our ideas and feelings about our present topic (whatever that is). How to tell what belongs? How to feel our way to “enough”?

I’ve often thought I had a bad or spotty memory, but lately I’ve changed my mind about that. Instead I think I have no story, no linear organizing principal. I grew up going back and forth between my parents’ two houses, or rather, my father’s house and my mother’s basement flat, then my mother’s boarding house where she rented out rooms to many tenants. My father’s big house held a jumbled sequence of various girlfriends plus visiting professors, graduate students, and relatives from the East Coast or Israel.  All these people passed through what might otherwise have been the intimate confines of my childhood; and we traveled, too. By the time I was seventeen, I’d been to England, France, Norway, Sweden, Italy, China, Israel, India and around the United States. On top of that , I read voraciously, so many other lives and stories filled my imagination, and I overheard a lot about the lives of the people around my parents, about my older sisters, about my parents’ lovers, their children, their imagined futures. My memory, in other words, is a hoarder’s nest of not-quite-stories.

Stories take and make sense of people (who become the easier to wrangle, but not flat “characters”) and events (that sequence and connect causally to become not-entirely-predictable but linear and sensical “plot”). In this way, stories lie. Lies of omission. Lies of the hoarder who’s stuffed everything in the closets to present a cleared house.

On a podcast of Michael Krazny’s show Forum recorded the other day, a panel of organizers and a psychologist address problems with clutter. The parallels to writing were clear to me. For the first time, I wondered: could I use story to organize my house?

In a way, nonfiction is like a staged house. I love the clean lines of staged real estate: the fantasy that if I lived here, I would live like this, with swept wooden floors, a few lovely pieces of furniture, white curtains blowing through open windows full of sun. Simplicity. It’s not a lie and it’s not the whole truth. It’s one streamlined version that lets you see the bones of the place, something clutter would cover and obscure.

I recently read Between the World and Me by Ta-Nahisi Coates. His theme filter—this is a letter to his fifteen-year-old son about surviving as a young black man in a country that understands itself to have permission to kill such men without consequence—strongly shapes the book. The book draws on the material of memoir. Coates had a whole life around the events he selects to describe. He had friends, first memories, fascinating and complicated parents, but what’s in the book is all relevant—crucial—to his theme. It’s a slender book that packs a lot of power and lyricism, beauty and insight and emotion. But it does not pack extra anecdotes, a tangential story about finding housing in New York or even being an autodidactic writing genius. Could he have found a way to include these and many other topics under the rubric of his theme? Absolutely. But the art and the power and, yes, the meaning itself comes of choosing what to include and leaving everything else out.