Coming Clean

Coming Clean by Kimberly Rae Miller

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The first and only time I ever saw Hoarders on TV, I was at the beach with my husband and some friends. After the show, I went downstairs to our room and began cleaning. My husband, who was reading in bed, asked what I was doing. I told him what I’d seen and that I needed to clean the room. My husband is a firefighter so he is very familiar with hoarder houses. “But we’re at the beach,” he said. “We hardly have any stuff here.” That didn’t matter to me. I cleaned the room anyway, hanging all the clothes, emptying the bathroom trash. I even did a load of laundry. When Kimberly Rae Miller’s book popped up on BookBub yesterday I almost didn’t get it, but then I opted for the look inside option and I’m glad I did. I bought the book and read the whole thing yesterday. It’s different from what I expected. Despite all the difficulties of living with her parents’ hoarding and growing up in that kind of atmosphere, Miller loves her parents. In many ways, they were great parents and in many ways they were horrifying. This book does a good job of opening a window on that dichotomy. It’s an incredibly quick read and I’m glad I finished it, because frankly parts of it are difficult to get through. It’s enlightening though and worth the read, especially if you know of anyone in that situation and have not been able to fathom how they got there and why they haven’t fixed it.

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