Why Ruin Everyone’s Life for Dolls?

If capitalism is a disease, then hoarding is one of its most literal symptoms. Unable to discard even the most seemingly useless possessions, hoarders accumulate and accumulate. The “normal” cycle of consumerism—purchase cheap things, keep them for a bit, then trash them and buy more—is disrupted. Hoarders hang on to objects, and when clinging to one thing isn’t enough, they acquire more, whether through shopping, scavenging, or recycling. The irony is that hoarding is a disorder of loss: many hoarders surround themselves with objects that remind them of happier times, and they imbue their detritus with talismanic weight. In her new book Hoarders (Wave Books, 2021), the Los Angeles poet Kate Durbin renders this loss in detailed portraits based on the reality TV series of the same name that aired on A&E from 2009 to 2013.

The book follows 16 middle-aged Americans—14 individuals and one couple—through their downward spirals dealing (or not dealing) with painful yet familiar issues such as alcoholism, divorce, and cancer. Durbin’s down-on-their-luck characters long not for youth exactly, but for a former version of themselves that still contained possibilities. Unlike reality TV, however, which can Marie Kondo even the worst living quarters in just one episode, there are no happy endings for Durbin’s protagonists. Their possibilities ended long ago, in part, and ironically, because they are hung up on the belongings that ostensibly define their past. As packrats caught in a vicious cycle, they accumulate to buffer against the pain of loss, but they lose the affection and care they need precisely because they accumulate.

Enter Marlena, Durbin’s first subject, who “was a fashion model for many years in Europe,” although her current state is a horrific inversion of the jet-set life she fondly recalls:

I felt like we stepped onto a magic carpet and just flew Cost Plus World Market mandala pillows, Indian elephant throw, crushed banana chips, blackened bananas, crumpled Sunset magazine pages, stuffed panda in lotus pose on Marlena’s bed

But after our daughter was born, my husband started dating other women secretly dozens of Louis Vuitton bags under the bed

When I found out, I just wanted a divorce on the front door: KEEP OUT ABSOLUTELY NO SOLICITORS—THIS MEANS YOU, Beware of Dog sign, card that says OUR LADY OF LOURDES PRAY FOR US and underneath, in shaky handwriting, HELP ME GOD

For Marlena, the magic carpet ride ends in the great junk heap called divorce. Instead of flashing Louis Vuitton bags on the runway, her bags collect dust under a bed in Topanga Canyon as she waits desperately for her circumstances to improve. Durbin intersplices Marlena’s voice—verbatim bits of narration from the TV show stylized in italics—with carefully detailed catalogues of the items she has collected. The contrast between Marlena’s narrative and the listing of her possessions is jarring, but it highlights the symbiosis between the two. The crushed banana chips, crumpled Sunset magazines, and other debris function like a Greek Chorus, echoing and enacting the dramatic tale that unfolds. “Even though this is trash to most humans on the planet,” Marlena says, “it isn’t trash to me.” Who knew so much could be cathected onto crushed banana chips?

In an email exchange, Durbin tells me that the process of writing Hoarders was like wading through “mounds of garbage.” As she watched more and more episodes of the eponymous TV series, she “warmed up to the trash mounds” and began to find them suggestive: “I started to see things in the mush that my imagination invented.” Composing the poems was also deeply emotional and, as Durbin took notes, she often watched TV in tears. She felt a strong connection to the material because many members of her large family are hoarders who could have been featured on the show themselves. This empathy extends to even her most unlikeable characters: Craig, for example, who hoards Nazi memorabilia, among other things. Through Craig’s narration we learn that his father, a former SS officer, is the source of his trauma. One day when Craig was a young boy, his father asked him if he liked his dinner. When Craig said yes, his father responded, “I’m glad you liked that because that was your pet rabbit.”

Durbin’s relationship with trash traces back to her childhood in the late 1980s and early ’90s in Orange County, California, which she refers to as her “rat child days,” marked by neglect and isolation. Her fundamentalist parents pulled her out of Christian school because it was not Christian enough, opting to homeschool her instead. Wandering her house alone, Durbin was drawn to the forbidden world of TV, magazines, and pop music. She was desperate to understand what life was like outside of suburbia and was soon captivated by the forms of media—the “trash”—she was restricted from accessing. Despite these prohibitions, she secretly checked out Christopher Pike horror novels from the library, watched TV at her friends’ houses, and even snuck a radio into a drainage ditch so she could listen to Paula Abdul. Her immersion in media became so intense that she began to feel like she was being pulled into another reality.

If you have ever image-searched Durbin (you should), it’s clear that her “look”—kitschy Disney princess dresses, long pink and blue wigs, glittery makeup—is a function of her artistic practice. Heavily influenced by the art world—think Andy Warhol and Cindy Sherman—Durbin’s videos, performance art, and fashion, coupled with her feminist politics, complicate easy comparisons of her work to that of conceptual poets such as Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place. In Durbin’s 2014 performance piece Hello Selfie, for example, performers in Los Angeles’s Chinatown covered their bodies in Hello Kitty stickers then took “selfies in a public space for an hour straight, uploading them in real time to a Facebook event wall.”

It’s almost impossible to imagine Durbin’s unruly spirit stuck inside the dreary confines of the academic writing workshop. “People in the MFA workshop [at UC Riverside] were not very nice about what I was writing,” Durbin says. “I also had people tell me pop culture was shallow to write about. Which was funny, because this attitude mimicked the attitude of the strict Christians, who found pop culture simultaneously shallow (‘secular’) and sinful. All this aversion felt the same to me. I was used to being not acceptable, even though I found it—as always—painful, that rejection.” Refusing the safe formal and lyric routes that the MFA establishment would have accepted, Durbin instead forged her own way. From the start, she was something of an outsider, testing the limits of both form (what “counts” as poetry) and subject (what is “allowable” content). This experimentation and independent thinking paid off. It’s precisely her unexpected approaches to art, her “trashy” subjects and her willingness to break genre conventions, that make her singular.

After her debut, The Ravenous Audience (2009), Durbin parted ways with first-person lyric “I” poetry to pursue more avant-garde, conceptually-driven texts. Her reality TV books, E! Entertainment (2014) and Hoarders, graft transcribed material from one context (media) onto the slower medium of poetry. This decelerates and decontextualizes the experience of consumption, enabling readers to focus on details they might have otherwise ignored had they simply watched the episodes on a screen. E! Entertainment, with its garish pink pages, is divided into “channels” in which the reader can “tune-in” to various shows. Durbin depicts personalities from The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills saying mindless things like, “I just want it to be a fun night. I don’t want any problems or drama.” A few pages later, Kim Kardashian offers the same asinine blather: “Even though we are arguing, we still have this huge dinner … I’m hoping we can just forget about the tension and drama, and let’s just enjoy ourselves.”

While E! Entertainment is original in concept, it feels as if Durbin hasn’t quite mastered her own form. Her reservation in directing the “celebrities” on the page means the book mirrors reality shows rather than digs in and critiques them. Hoarders, however, gets it right. It is by far Durbin’s best book. Her active control in sculpting narratives generates a lively analysis of the pathological effects of American consumerism and pop culture. Instead of the shallow, glitzy stars of E! Entertainment with their “drama”—which designer dress to wear at a party, for example—we get characters like Cathy, a medical lab technician from Centralia, Illinois: “I collect lots of things but especially clothes Windsor Wildfire prom dress, $14.99, marked down from $149.50, Talbot’s Striped Flounce dress, $129.00 marked down from $169.00, Charlotte Russe lace and chiffon bridesmaid dress, $39.99 marked down from $49.99.” A mother of five, Cathy has worked the night shift for 21 years and is $50,000 in debt due to her shopping addiction. By splicing together Cathy’s thoughts and feelings about her failing marriage with piles of discounted wedding dresses, Durbin highlights the connection between an unsatisfying home life, consumerism, and debt. “I’m chronically disappointed,” Cathy says, and disappointment fuels her desire to shop. In centering imperfect, struggling shopaholics more likely to amass cheap dresses from TJ Maxx than hit up Rodeo Drive, Durbin provides insight into the most dysfunctional realms of consumer culture.

Or consider Chuck, a painter in Bisbee, Arizona. For him, the metaphor of trash turns out to be trashy art. His obsession, like Marlena’s, is lost love, but his desire to preserve it takes a misogynistic twist, revealing a perverse relationship to his paintings of women: “I have hundreds of paintings of sketches of naked women with coffee stains.” Chuck tells us that he was the happiest he has ever been in his first marriage, but when his wife had surgery after giving birth, he couldn’t see her in pain: “I would have upsurges of anger every day, you know, at blank canvases.” Predictably, Chuck and his wife divorce, which he blames on her cheating and his alcoholism.

As Chuck relates his story, Durbin focuses intently on his paintings to render her own feminist portrait. She details the nude subjects resting on couches, their legs crossed and eyes closed. These women exist as captives of Chuck’s gaze, which is exactly where he wants them, safe in a crypt of desire for him alone to enjoy. But it’s Durbin’s gaze and careful observation—“painting of two nearly naked women wearing southwestern style shawls that expose their breasts, one reclining on the couch, the other on the floor next to a bull skull, hand over crotch”—that reveal Chuck’s true belief: women are objects. Childbirth and the subsequent “spoiling” of his wife’s body caused Chuck’s marital problems, not, as he claims, his inability to see his wife in pain. Like Robert Browning’s speaker in “My Last Duchess,” who murders his wife and keeps her “perfected” image in a painting for his eyes only, Chuck has similar violent impulses: “I started collecting guns painting of a naked blonde hunched over, clutching her stomach”—impulses that Durbin lays bare through her powerful juxtaposition of subject and object.

Like every psychological disorder, hoarding presents potential dangers. It’s not unusual, for example, for hoarders’ homes to become fire hazards, or to be so cluttered that the inhabitants are crushed by piles of their own possessions. There’s a reason Dante put hoarders in the fourth circle of hell, sandwiched inside all of the other circles of sinners. These tragedies sometimes become material for sensationalistic news stories. A quick Google search for “hoarders” and “death” turns up such headlines as “Detroit hoarder, 80, found in home dead, eaten by dog,” “Hoarder found dead at home entombed in mountains of rubbish,” and “Woman found mummified in San Francisco home may have died years ago.” The more extreme outcomes of hoarding suggest that we can succumb to capitalism in its most berserk form: death by things. As Shelley, a retired salesclerk from Michigan who collects Barbies, astutely asks in Hoarders, “Why ruin everyone’s life for dolls?” It’s a good question that only a hoarder can’t answer.

In Hoarders, this treacherous reality sometimes takes a humorous twist, as with Allie and Noah, a married couple from Chicago who stockpile books. One can’t help but be charmed by them. Allie: “In this house, we have two very familiar phrases— ‘I love you’ and ‘timberrrrrr!’” books behind front door, collapsing.” But Durbin’s portraits gradually become more absurd and macabre. Alice, a cashier from Wisconsin, hoards cats, whether dead or alive: “When my first cat got killed, I put him in the freezer because I wanted to get him cremated among Ziploc bags, a tiny black cat, body frosted, ears missing.” Then there’s Hannah, from Washington state, who derives her philosophy from a poster declaring, “EVERYTHING THAT COMES OUT OF ME IS AUTHENTICALLY ME.” For Hannah, this translates into hoarding her own shit: “Feces everywhere, garbage everywhere, bloody tampons on the floor pink fiberglass insulation hanging from the ceiling.”

Durbin’s dramatis personae are situated in direct relation to hoarders of wealth, the producers of the cheap things her characters amass. While the book’s hoarders attempt to control their lives through accumulation, this insatiability only shows how disempowered, demoralized, and lost they really are. Off-stage, the manufacturers of commodities—as well as the producers of highly rated reality TV shows—are the ones with real power, making vast quantities of money off of hoarders’ suffering. Paradoxically, readers come to feel and understand society’s power players through the sheer powerlessness of Durbin’s exploited cast. For the Marlenas, Chucks, and Shelleys of the world, possessions are totems of sentimental value, or fetish objects. Durbin’s characters become metaphors for a culture that denies most people social power by tricking them into thinking that things give life meaning or a semblance of control. The humiliation and entrapment of hoarders’ lives become fodder for an audience that further dehumanizes them. There is no getting outside of the quicksand of capitalism; the viewer is as complicit in the cycle of consumerism as the cast.

Hoarders concludes with Maggie, a single mom in Utah, who believes her house is cursed:

On the inside of the house, we have furniture, we have clothes, we have toys, and we have demons mildewed nursery blankets her great aunt made with Raggedy Anns, one room school houses, mirror-image American flags, illegible old fashioned writing

Maggie’s house is cursed, just not by what she thinks. She knows there is something wrong with her “things” but can only articulate the problem in religious terms (demons, good versus evil), a condition that recalls Durbin’s fundamentalist upbringing. Maggie puts a line of salt at the front door, watches TV with her daughter, and waits in limbo: “If we can’t get this house cleaned up and get the demons out, we’re going to be homeless.” Does Maggie know that what’s “out there” has already infiltrated her house (“when you leave doors open, things come through”), infiltrated all of our houses, that inside and outside are one, “mirror-image American flags” of capitalist culture intent on exploiting her? In the end, we see Maggie surrounded by moving boxes. If she leaves, she will either take her things with her or acquire more, and the demons of America’s ailing culture are sure to follow.

“There’s this scene from the ’80s movie Poltergeist,” Durbin tells me, “when the little girl puts her hand on the TV screen, touches the TV static, and says, ‘they’re here!’ I often say that scene is the summation of my reality TV writing practice. I feel I’m that little girl getting sucked into the TV and becoming the static. I’m there, I’m everywhere, but I’m particles.”