JESSIE SHOLL’S West Village apartment is a rent-stabilized fifth-floor walk-up, three small rooms and a sleeping loft where she and her husband, both writers, have lived for seven years. Perfect-storm conditions for clutter. But Ms. Sholl, a petite, pale-skinned woman of 42, keeps things tidy with routine “purges.” Even of objects she likes.
“I should get rid of this,” she said on a recent afternoon, pointing to a chicken sitting on top of a bookshelf, handmade by an artist out of recycled shower curtains. “It serves no purpose.”
Two minutes earlier she had been admiring its colorful plumes.
She laughed. “It’s a little pathological, I admit.”
If Ms. Sholl is overly zealous in her approach to housekeeping, one can understand why after reading her recently published memoir, “Dirty Secret: A Daughter Comes Clean About Her Mother’s Compulsive Hoarding.” The parent Ms. Sholl describes is a woman whose cluttered living room inexplicably contains five sewing machines and at least eight pairs of moldy cowboy boots. She is someone who buys too much and doesn’t throw anything away, even as the stuff piles up and impedes normal life — the textbook definition of a hoarder.
In dealing with her mother’s home in Minneapolis, Ms. Sholl has spent much of her life alternating between feeling shame about its squalid condition and attempting to rid it of the books, scraps of paper, empty food cartons and thrift-store tchotchkes littering every available surface.
When she learned that her mother had cancer, in 2006, Ms. Sholl flew out for one last-ditch cleanup attempt, an effort that inspired “Dirty Secret.” “The stove was piled feet-high with dirty pans,” Ms. Sholl said. “It gnawed at me that she was living that way.”
Many children of hoarders know the feeling. Even as scientists study the cognitive activity that accompanies the disorder and television shows like TLC’s “Hoarding: Buried Alive” and A&E’s “Hoarders” have made it a mainstream issue, scant attention has been paid to how hoarding affects families of the afflicted, especially their children. Most are left to their own devices to make sense of growing up in homes where friends and relatives are unable to visit, with parents who seem to value inanimate objects more than the animate ones navigating the goat paths through the clutter.
Randy O. Frost, a psychology professor at Smith College, has been studying hoarders for two decades and is an author of “Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things.” Children of hoarders, he noted, often display a tortured ambivalence toward their parents, perhaps because unlike spouses or friends of hoarders, they had little choice but to live amid the junk.
“They grew up in this difficult environment and naturally came to resent it,” Dr. Frost said. “But at the same time, these are your parents and you have to not only respect and love but take care of them. What happens when they get old?”
NOT surprisingly, there are a number of online support groups and blogs devoted to children of hoarders, including Hoarder’s Son and Behind the Door. The most popular, Children of Hoarders,?? maintains an online forum where members trade strategies for helping parents, discuss issues like “doorbell dread” (more on that later) and share stories. One account, posted by a woman named Tracy Schroeder, details in emotionally raw terms her mother’s death and the subsequent cleanup of the family home in Clovis, N.M., which was filled with magazines, craft supplies and dog feces.
“The COH Web site was my saving grace,” Ms. Schroeder, 42, said. “Nobody understands the weirdness of growing up this way unless they go through it.”
In high school, Ms. Schroeder said, she was a cheerleader and president of her class, but she lived in constant fear that “someone would see our house.” After her parents divorced, she strategically arranged visits with friends when she was spending weekends with her father. The college she attended was 20 minutes from her mother’s house, but she rarely visited, she said, because “I wouldn’t want to stay there, and that would cause fights.”
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