For fans of The Glass Castle and The Liars’ Club, Amanda Uhle’s tender, heartbreaking, and hilarious memoir chronicles 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 family’s 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.Amanda’s 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 mother’s hoarding disorder flourished and her father’s 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 Amanda’s 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.
Amanda Uhle will be in conversation with fellow author Dave Eggers.
About the Authors
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 McSweeney’s, an independent nonprofit publisher of distinctive books and magazines.
Dave Eggers is the author of many books, among them The Eyes and the Impossible, The Circle, The Monk of Mokha, Heroes of the Frontier, A Hologram for the King, and What Is the What. He is the founder of McSweeney’s, an independent publishing company, and co-founder of 826 Valencia, a youth writing center that has inspired over 70 similar organizations worldwide. Eggers is winner of the American Book Award, the Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award for Education, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the TED Prize, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is the 2024 John Newbery Medalist, for the most distinguished contribution to children's literature for The Eyes and the Impossible. Eggers is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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