Trash: An Innocent Girl: A Shocking Story of Squalor and Neglect

An extraordinary inside account of what it's like growing up in a hoarder's house. 'To start: it was just me and my mom. I am an only child, and she is a single parent. My mother is a trash hoarder. Ever since I can remember the house was always messy and stunk. At around age 9ish I noticed that something was wrong. My friends' houses didn't look like mine, and I wasn't allowed to have friends over for a slumber party. I started throwing bags of trash away every day, just to have my mom freak out when she got home: "Where did those papers go? There was a coupon in there for _____" or "Why did you throw those away? We can still use those," referring to stained/moth-eaten cloth scraps. I was trying to clean her room one day, and found newspapers from before I was born. We didn't eat at home anymore because the fridge was disgusting, and she used the sink as a trash can, so it got clogged. We always ate out, we never had a home-cooked meal, and I've never had a family dinner at a dinner table.To top things off my mom was morbidly obese (400+ lbs), she liked being naked around the house, and she was a bed wetter. She liked sitting on our leather couch naked. I stopped sitting on it years before I left; I had a stool in the corner of the living room. That is what I sat on, and that alone. I kept that corner as clean as I could. Made sure there was foot space, and that there wasn't dust on the walls. That was my corner, my space. It never seemed to matter though, eventually that spot would get overrun with trash too...' • Misery memoir meets extreme hoarding in this compelling account of how one little girl grew up in abject squalor