Goodreads asked Jennifer Howard:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Jennifer Howard The inspiration for CLUTTER: AN UNTIDY HISTORY was a painful one: My mother suffered a health crisis, compounded by dementia, and could no longer live at home. I'm an only child, and it fell to me to clean 50 years' worth of hoarded stuff out of her house. It took me two years to get through it all. It was the most painful thing I've ever had to do. Friends started sharing their own personal stories of family hoarding and painful cleanouts with me, and I got to wondering how clutter got to be such a huge problem for so many of us. The book is my attempt to trace some of the history and origins of clutter and our relationship to it, from the Victorians to Marie Kondo and beyond. Most of all, I hope the book will help others feel a little better about their own personal struggles with stuff. We often treat clutter as a personal failing, but it is much more than that.

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