Review: Destroy This Trope (A Review Of Destroy This House By Amanda Uhle)

By Hugh Blanton

 

Memoir is a genre of literature that has grown into a competition for who has the most fucked up family. (You think you got it bad? Listen to this!) The Mama Drama and Daddy Drama almost always boils down to a memoirist feeling like they didn't get enough love from their parents and they are begging the world to bestow sympathy and pity upon them. Often, memoirists expose themselves as fibbers and exaggerators when in order to round out a complete story they are forced to contradict themselves. Nick Flynn's many memoirs tell of his gritty, impoverished upbringing in Scituate, Massachusetts, but he's somehow able to afford a motorcycle—and then another motorcycle after he wrecks the first one. (He also tells of going on a European vacation but emphatically reminds us that he could only do it because he and his friends got discounted tickets.) Ocean Vuong writes of escaping his sadistic mother by telling her he was accepted into college and goes away to check into inpatient drug rehab instead. He pays for his rehab with state-issued insurance and tells us that his mother is none the wiser, believing her son had straightened himself out and is on his way to a college degree. Vuong overlooked that the insurance statements would have been mailed to his mother, completely exposing his ruse. But these are the kinds of books that make the best-seller lists: readers crave these heart-breaking stories of redemption so much they are willing to overlook the details that show memoirs to be mostly narcissistic malarkey.

 

In Amanda Uhle's memoir, Destroy This House, she researches court records, newspaper articles, and correspondence to get a complete story of her eccentric parents. Her father, Stephen, was a wheeler-dealer who made and then lost a fortune. Her mother, Sandie, was a fashion designer and hoarder who bought more bolts of fabric than could ever be sewn into clothing in five lifetimes. Uhle opens up her memoir in a flower shop where she is buying a funeral arrangement for her mother. When she lets slip that her mother isn't dead yet—she's still in hospice—the appalled shop owner hands Uhle her check back and tells her not to return until her mother has passed. While it's certainly plausible that a flower shop owner would turn away business like that on moral grounds, it does set up a tiny bit of doubt as to whether we are on our way to another memoir stretching the truth and reaching for extraordinariness. And there are quite a few more doubt-inducing incidents like this one throughout the memoir. After the flower shop scene, Uhle takes us back to the beginning, to her childhood, and gives us her family's story.

 

Uhle often refers to her childhood home as "Long's Island," Long being the family surname (Uhle married Frank Uhle and took his last name in 2003). As with most memoirs, I was waiting for the childhood trauma to rear its head, but Uhle does not indulge in trauma porn in Destroy This House. About the most traumatic episode of her childhood was going without electrical power for eight days after Hurricane Gloria struck the northeastern US in 1985 (they actually lived on Long Island, New York at the time, a tree in their back yard toppled and destroyed her swing set). Their home was a mansion, as she describes it, but they rarely had any visitors in it. Her young mother was just developing her hoarding disorder, packages of fabric were stacked floor to ceiling throughout the house. The hoarding extended to food—her mother bought more than was ever needed, at first storing on the kitchen counters and in the fridge, then throughout the rest of the house when those were taken up. Yes, the hoarding extended even to perishables—rotten food and moldy bread were common at Long's Island. Even at this young age, Uhle knew her parents were weird, but it did not render her traumatized. Her childhood continued on fairly normal (she was a champion swimmer) until the patent that her father had for a hand soap dispenser valve fell through. The family fortune was soon gone.

 

One of the things that made this memoir difficult to write, Uhle says, was her parents' penchant for lying. She simply couldn't be sure if the things they told her growing up were true. Her father often told the story of how he and her mother lost all their wedding gifts the day after the wedding in 1975 when the rope that was used to strap them to the roof of the car came loose and they all tumbled to the highway. He said they did not stop to pick them back up. (They were moving cross country.) Why wouldn't they have stopped, Uhle often wondered; but she did notice that there wasn't anything in her childhood home that resembled wedding gifts—like no matching set of fine china, for instance. Other explanations for the missing wedding gifts could have been pawning them during lean months or leaving them behind during midnight moves when they were skipping out on rent. (Her father did not make his fortune until a few years after they were married.) Other dubious stories from her parents was her father saying the Miami mafia had exiled him to Indiana; her mother claiming she had lupus (there were no outward symptoms).

 

And then progressing through the memoir I couldn't help but wonder if Uhle had inherited her parent's fibbing gene as well. There is plenty to doubt here. She claims she had to wear dentures after her baby teeth were pulled due to acid damage—it's unlikely her parents would have went through the expense and trouble of dentures when all they had to do was simply wait for her permanent teeth to grow in. When Uhle was only eight she told one of her fellow third-graders that her father had been divorced before marrying her mother and the third-grade girl responded with a very unlikely grown up remark: "Tragic. Divorce is a very bad money decision." She describes a neighbor's car as a two-door Pinto, then a few sentences later calls it a sedan, and she also remarks on another neighbor's mascara as being azure, which of course would be the color of eye shadow, not mascara—an indication that she's thoughtlessly making things up as she goes along. Uhle's parents were hounded by bill collectors for enormous amounts of debts, all of which (except the back taxes) could have simply been discharged in bankruptcy court. The sex talks her mother gave her are cringey enough to be doubtful and Uhle claims her mother gave her a vibrator for Christmas—opened right under the tree with the whole family present. "Let me know if you want help figuring out how to use it," she claims her mother said. (Her parents were active members of the Lutheran church.)

 

Despite the many problems with this memoir, it doesn't devolve into the "poor pitiful me" trope like so many others do (see Matthew Perry, see Tommy Dorfman). While Uhle is certainly despairing, she doesn't come off as whining: 

 

If there was another feeling in those years, besides the hollowness, it was the everything-is-closing-in feeling of being unwillingly confined. I'd looked for various ways to escape my parents and their problems, and I'd failed to find any routes out. All their lives, my parents built their own world—an island—with their own rules and their own truth. The harder I tried to get away the more permanently stuck I became. 

 

Uhle does, however, seem to be seeking pity at one point when she mentions that her mother left a book out in plain sight in her apartment: When Our Grown Kids Disappoint Us: Letting Go of Their Problems, Loving Them Anyway, and Getting On With Our Lives. That'll show her, mom.

Hugh Blanton's latest book is Kentucky Outlaw. He can be reached on X @HughBlanton5