Destroy This HouseDestroy This House

This poignant and humorous memoir details the complexities of navigating childhood with a hoarding mother and a scheming father, highlighting the bizarre lifestyle, constant deceptions and eventual journey toward personal independence amidst familial chaos.
'Amanda Uhle's parents - a charismatic wheeler-dealer and a striving fashion designer - preside over a late twentieth-century family like no other. Their love is fierce, their lifestyle bizarre, and their deceptions countless. Destroy This House is their tender, heart-breaking, hilarious, and wholly original story. Uhle grew up in an outlandish home filled with raucous love and humor, punctuated all too frequently by her mother and father's unbelievable antics and self-defeating, desperate choices. They bartered for dental surgery and drove a Lincoln Town Car to the food bank. When they were nearly ruined financially, the family abandoned their repossessed mansion for humble parish housing and her dad became a preacher. Throughout the '80s and '90s, Uhle, her little brother, and their parents seesawed wildly between being filthy rich and dirt poor, devious and virtuous, fake and real. Over forty turbulent years, their ten different houses and apartments were also full of something else - lots and lots of stuff. Between her mother's hoarding and her father's penchant for maximalism, every corner and countertop became piled with unopened boxes of mail-order fabric, never-to-be worn clothing, and mounds of expired food that slowly morphed into shades of pink and green. All of their ever-increasing possessions were purchased with their usually overdrawn accounts. Uhle longed to destroy it all. Instead, she found a way to care for her parents despite their endless exploits and to orchestrate her own escape into hard-won independence"--