Hypertext Magazine asked Deborah S. Greenhut, author of The Hoarder’s Wife, “Why did you write about the hoarder’s wife instead of the hoarder?”
By Deborah S. Greenhut
The simple answer is that hoarders’ families have a story too, and it is often eclipsed by the enormity of the hoard and the volume—meaning the voice and personality—of the hoarding person. People often assume that the family members, friends, and partners simply allow themselves to become doormats from the beginning of the hoarding and bear some responsibility for letting it happen. Not the whole story.
To explain, I can start from the, to me, interesting responses of people whom I have told about the book. Most zoom immediately to the word, “Hoarder,” overlooking the title signals that someone else is the focus. They often gush about the grossness of all the media obsession with hoarder clean-ups, and sometimes I leave it at that. My bad, I sometimes think to myself, but at least they’re making a connection. Much like the terrible car accident we all must rubberneck on the highway. While it’s a clear reference to someone other than the hoarder (work with me for a moment), the title also signals that the wife belongs to the hoarder and, in a way, to the hoard as well. And that is exactly the problem I want to talk about—the overwhelm. Our perceptions about most mental health issues can become quite twisty because we search so vigilantly for causes and persons to blame even if we have no solution. I wanted to explore the question of why the wife stayed. Yes, it’s personal.
In my own life as a Hoarder Wife or Spouse (there is a whole culture of naming the relationships in the Hoarder’s constellation), I could tell you that I cleaned, I protested, I pleaded, I threatened, I threw out junk, and all the other action verbs you might expect from someone who realized the collections were getting out of hand. None of it worked. Some of it came right back into the house. When people asked me why I stayed, my answers ranged from the culturally acceptable, “I have children to think about,” to the confused emotional one, “I don’t know!” to the understated glimmer of understanding about my future, “I know it’s not going to end well.” Underneath all that was love. But I truly felt ashamed and humiliated and stymied in all my attempts to get help for us. If you read forums and chat rooms for families and friends of hoarders, you will find those feelings are the staple of our community. People who are not living in the situation do not understand and have trouble finding compassion for family members whom they perceive as tolerating and abetting the hoarder’s behavior—“Set boundaries!” “Throw it all away!”—Those rational, unilateral actions seldom succeed as a permanent defense against the expansion of the hoard. I tried many such Maginot lines. Eventually, I ran out of energy for defending them. His walls—metaphorical, emotional, and literal—were stronger. If it were just the stuff, it could be cleaned up. The anger and depression that gave birth to those piles needed more than domestic rules to heal them. Television provides only a small window into the hostility and fear a hoarding person will express when the accumulation is threatened. Away from the cameras? Let’s just say, the emotional war is worse, even worse than the smell.
It takes two to tango. That is one thing I wanted to look at in the novel. Does the wife make poor decisions about how to manage the situation at home? “If you tolerate, you teach,” is an important concept in managing. I wanted to look at how tolerance and kindness could become liabilities for the caregiving spouse. What had the wife accepted from the hoarding husband before that issue went out of control? Was there a kind of grooming going on earlier in the relationship for the person who preferred peace to conflict? Compelling a person to live in unhealthy conditions is a form of abuse; accepting the sickness is another mental health issue. Chickens and eggs? Let the reader decide.
I wanted to write about the history of the hoarder and his chief defender to understand their ultimate schism. In the aftermath of my former spouse’s suicide, I could only find out more about myself. For thirty-five years, I asked him about himself, but he would not tell. The messages he expressed were embedded (I could say buried) in the things he gathered around him. Sorting through the wreck when he died gave me back what I had forgotten to keep, shared now in the fictional life of Grace Berg.
So, I wrote the novel from the wife’s perspective for three reasons:
It’s the one I know from experience;
It’s the culturally ignored perspective of the hoarder duo; and
I needed to know why I stayed.
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At age eight, Deborah S. Greenhut announced her ambition to become an author. Her mother replied, “Become a teacher instead to make a living.” Crestfallen, ten-year-old Deborah perfected her skill with a spangled baton to twirl solo as her school’s mascot. A one-time concert-pianist-in-training, Deborah longed to trade up for a conductor’s baton, but that career path seemed closed to women in the 1960s. After earning her B.A. in English from Middlebury College then a PhD from Rutgers University, she pursued her original dream by becoming a writer, a teacher, and, later, a dean. Her poems and cultural reviews have appeared in print and online at www.oobr.com , medium.com , and Red Booth Review. Her way-off Broadway production of Difficult Subjects, was selected for the Best Plays of the Strawberry Festival, Volume 2. A multi-genre work, How I Live. With Terror, developed as an artist-in-residence at 92 Street Y/Makor, appeared in www.Zeek.net. In 2017, she received the Princemere Poetry Prize. The Hoarder’s Wife is her first novel. Deborah now lives in a clean house in New Jersey where she can focus on making art in a room of her own.