A Funny, Charming Book about . . . Clutter.

Year of No Clutter by Eve Schaub. Follow the link to the author’s website.

Since I’ve been so immersed in political and true-crime podcasts and articles for the past months my book posts have been a little sparse. I spent some time today trying to come up with something to post for this week, attempting to persuade myself that I really was going to read the book I have about the Peloponnesian War. (That may actually happen at some point, as it’s excellently written, and I love the Greeks–did my masters speech recital about them.) But I’m ending up with this audiobook, written by the same woman who wrote a book a couple of years back about going a year as a family without eating any added sugar. I didn’t like that book too much, as I found her premise a bit irritating: that she could go ahead and make sweet things as long as she made them with glucose (sold under the name of “dextrose”) instead of sucrose (which is half fructose). Actually, what I found to be irritating was that because of her I ordered a 50-lb. bag of dextrose and then realized I just didn’t want to use it.

You have to make fairly major adjustments in recipes in order to substitute it, and in the end you’re still eating sugar, albeit not the most toxic kind. So I ended up tossing out most of it. Jim was appalled.

This book was a suggestion for me on Hoopla, the audio service I can access through my library system, so I gave it a try. So far I’m only about an hour and a half into it, but it has already made me laugh out loud several times. Schaub’s sometimes-rather-preachy tone about sugar is completely absent in this book, and the reader (who isn’t the author) is excellent. Since we’re moving out of our house we have to get rid of a bunch of our stuff, and we (or rather Jim) have to make room for what we are taking with us over at my in-laws’. So this is a very timely book.

Schaub’s husband says in the intro that when they were dating he once wrote “I love you” on a packet of sugar at a restaurant where they were eating and gave it to Eve. She smiled and tucked it into her purse, saying that she’d have to save it. Years later he found that sugar packet in their junk room. (She calls it the “hell room,” a term I don’t like, but there it is.) So this book is a chronicle of her attempt to clear out said room, a 500-square-foot load of utter and complete junk, over the course of a year. (Yet another one of those year-long stunt books, I know, but this one is really good, I promise.) So far she’s enlisted her 10-year-old and 15-year-old daughters in the cause, although the 10-year-old is just like her mother and so probably won’t be much help. She has also visited the house of a true, dyed-in-the-wool hoarder, a man who has died in the midst of an unbelievable horror, and her powers of description are pretty great. Now she’s back to her own house, determined to get going. I’m finding the book to be so charming that I’m champing at the bit to keep going on it, so as soon as i finish this post I’m going to go fold laundry so I can listen to it some more. Can you believe it?

There’ll be an update as soon as I finish it. Even if you’re the most strict minimalist on the planet, I think you’d enjoy the book. It’ll be like exploring a whole alien culture. And if you’re a “collector” . . . well, maybe it will be a nudge. Who knows what may be lurking under that pile?

Promised update: I did indeed finish the book, finding myself as fascinated with how this whole story was going to end as I’ve been in the past with murder mysteries. Did I mention that it’s just charming? Oh yes, I did. Schaub manages to deal with some fairly serious issues, including depression and OCD, within the framework of a lighthearted narrative. I just can’t recommend it enough. If you struggle with stuff yourself you’ll get some much-needed sympathetic advice, and if you struggle with someone else who struggles with stuff you’ll gain understanding. I won’t tell you how it ends–you’ll just have to find out for yourself!

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