We’ve seen them in a Dateline story or an Oprah feature: homes that have become improbable repositories of – literally – tons of stuff. The camera crews zoom in on rooms crammed
floor-to-ceiling with stacks of newspapers and magazines. We watch, fascinated, as professional organizers attack the untidy rooms, or the host expresses horror at a filthy kitchen, but
never ask the larger question: How did it come to this? STUFF is the first book to explore compulsive hoarding, a disorder that affects as many as six million people. Using the latest
research, much of which they pioneered in their decade of study, along with vivid case histories of a range of hoarders (animal collectors, compulsive shoppers, elderly packrats,
scavengers), Frost and Steketee describe the various causes of hoarding – psychological and biological—and the traits by which you can identify a hoarder. In a portrait that disproves many
of our assumptions about the often-hidden disease (for example, most hoarders aren't reacting to childhood poverty or deprivation), they also examine the forces behind a hoarder’s behavior
and the ways in which they affect all of us, whether it’s the passion of a collector, the rigor of someone whose desk is always clean, the sentimentality of the person who saves ticket
stubs. For the sufferers, their relatives and friends, and all the rest of us with complicated relationships to our things, STUFF answers the question of what happens when our stuff starts
to own us.
