Destroy This House: A Memoir

(Hardback)

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Description

For fans of The Glass Castle and The Liars Club, a tender, heartbreaking, and hilarious memoir chronicling the challenges of growing up with a desperately scheming father, a mother plagued by an acute hoarding disorder, and parenting parents while seeking independence.

The Long familys love was fierce, their lifestyle bizarre, and their deceptions countless. Once her parents were gone, Amanda Uhle realized she was closer to them than anyone else, yet she found herself utterly confounded by the lives they had led.

Amandas striving fashion designer mother and her charismatic wheeler-dealer father wove a complex life together that spanned ten different homes across five states over forty perplexing years. Throughout her childhood, as her mothers hoarding disorder flourished and her fathers schemes crumbled, contradictions abounded. They bartered for dental surgery and drove their massive Lincoln Town Car to the food bank. When financial ruin struck, they abandoned their repossessed mansion for humble parish housing, and Amandas father became a preacher. They swung between being filthy rich and dirt poor, devious and virtuous, lonely and loved, fake and real.

In Destroy This House, Amanda sets out to document her parents unbelievable exploits and her own hard-won escape into independence. With humor and tenderness, Uhle has crafted a heartfelt and utterly unique memoir, capturing the raucousness, pain, joy, and ultimately, the boundless love that exists between all parents and children.

Reviews

An affecting portrait of a definitively dysfunctional family.Uhles book will hit home with many readers.
Kirkus Reviews
What do you get when parents pursuit of happiness collides with a childs need for stability Astounding anecdotes, expired canned goods and hard-won insights on loyalty and love.
Sarah Vowell,Lafayette in the Somewhat United States
The American Dream turns pathological in Amanda Uhle's beautiful memoir, Destroy This House, as Uhle reckons with her parents' snarled identities and confounding lifestyles. Poignant, wryly funny, and exquisitely written, Uhle masterfully depicts the confluence of ambition and greed, pioneerism and narcissism, love and pain. I devoured every sentence.
Erika Krouse, author ofTell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation
Destined to become a classic in the daughter-memoir genre, Destroy This House offers a tour of one couple's decaying, overdrawn world and the effect it had on their child, a devoted good-girl who did her best to help even as doing so began to compromise her own sanity. The authora Gen-Xer whose indomitable spirit will be as familiar to readers as her cassette mixtapesartfully excavates both her n'er-do-well parents' decaying home and her own furious compassion.
Ada Calhoun,New York Timesbestselling author ofAlso a Poet
An iconic, only-in-America fable of desperate Midwestern dreamers.
Dave Eggers, author ofA Hologram for the King
In her vivid and bracing debut, journalist Amanda Uhle turns her investigative skills inward, peeling back the layers of deception that shaped her childhood. Blending sharp inquiry with personal insight, she confronts the half-truths of her past, unraveling the tangled web of her parents grifts. Destroy This House is a wonderfully evocative exploration of family secrets and the ways they shaped this writers life.
Adrienne Brodeur, bestselling author ofWILD GAME: My Mother, Her Love, and Me
Confessional, vulnerable, honest, and scintillating. I loved every word.
Hannah Pittard, author ofIf You Love It, Let It Kill You
A fantastically entertaining tale of the most endearing grifters ever committed to printwho happen to be the authors parents.
Isaac Fitzgerald, author ofDirtbag, Massachusetts
Amanda Uhles extraordinary memoir does what so few do, combining absolutely jaw-dropping material with the writerly skill to make it sing. I wanted to reread it immediately. It is a stunning debut you will recommend to everyone you know.
Jennifer Traig, author ofDevil in the Details: Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood

Author Bio

Amanda Uhle writes about culture, politics, and civil rights for The Washington Post, Politico Magazine, The Boston Globe, and Newsweek. Uhle is coeditor of the I, Witness series of first-person stories by youth activists, former director of the 826michigan youth writing and tutoring program, and cofounder, with Dave Eggers, of the International Congress of Youth Voices. Their work with youth writing organizations worldwide is documented in Unnecessarily Beautiful Spaces for Young Minds on Fire. Uhle is the publisher and executive director of McSweeneys, an independent nonprofit publisher of distinctive books and magazines.