1/6/2023 0 Comments Domus the camel hoarder![]() ![]() I suspected that it wouldn’t be able to avoid sensationalism and doubted that a series of poems could really say something new about hoarding. ![]() I imagined that I’d cycle through the same revulsion, pity, and then shame while reading Kate Durbin’s new poetry collection, Hoarders. I’m lying in bed eating chocolate-covered almonds, watching. Laura is having what might be the worst day of her life, on national television. At one point, the camera zooms in on Laura’s face as she cries in the kitchen she is stricken with guilt for raising her children in this home. Laura’s A&E-appointed psychologist calls the house “probably the worst … I’ve ever been in, in terms of the smell.” The cleanup is almost unbearable to watch. Domus the camel hoarder tv#The TV cameras are not generous: They pan across black mold crawling like moss up the walls they capture Stephanie’s toddler stumbling over boxes strewn on the floor they land on dilapidated furniture and dust bunnies twice the size of actual bunnies. “I’ve felt before that she chooses these things over me and my sister,” she says, and even if it’s more complicated than that, she isn’t wrong. Michelle, 23, struggles with her resentment toward her mother. Laura’s two daughters have had their lives upended by their mother’s hoarding: Stephanie, 20, and her young daughter have moved back in to care for Laura. Her husband, Wayne, a psychologist, has stood by her for 15 years, despite what he calls the “over-accumulation” of stuff in their home. Instead, I’ve found Laura from Season 3, a 47-year-old writer with Stage 4 colon cancer. In an attempt to mitigate my own discomfort, I’ve tried to find an episode that feels more helpful than sensational. If they haven’t, the fantasy of the show’s support vanishes. ![]() But if you’re like me, you won’t research whether they’ve successfully been rehabilitated. Every story ends with an offer of treatment. Every episode ends with what is framed as a redemption: Dumpsters dropped off outside the house, cleaners in respirators disposing of junk, psychologists on hand to reassure participants of the need to let go. ![]() It is not just that I’m seeing people at their most vulnerable as they work through their trauma it’s that I frequently feel repulsed by them, as I’m supposed to. I’m an avid reality-TV fan- Plathville, the Real Housewives franchise, and My Strange Addiction all make my rotation-but I’ve always found Hoarders nearly too unsettling to watch. Now in its 12th season, Hoarders remains one of its most popular shows. The premiere recorded 2.5 million viewers, at the time one of the largest audiences for a premiere in A&E’s history. The show attempts the impossible union of a serious psychological analysis with the flair of television its appeal suggests a fascination with witnessing people’s pain as well as a shared curiosity about our attachments to stuff. But it aimed to horrify viewers, too, with its footage of gawking neighbors and close-ups on maggot-filled refrigerators, set to a horror-movie-esque soundtrack. The series introduced a public audience to a sometimes-private struggle-the obsessive need to acquire objects, coupled with the fear of letting them go-and offered its participants mental-health resources and extensive cleaning services. That year, the TV network A&E put the disorder on the cultural radar in an unparalleled way with its show Hoarders. I cannot remember whether I knew what compulsive hoarding was before 2009. ![]()
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