Stacks of fabric. Spoiled food. Personal care items covering every surface of the sink and shower. Mold overtaking a bathroom. Unfinished projects. A collapsed garage full of things. Unmaintained yard.

Welcome to the childhood and houses of the Longs, Amanda Uhle’s family, which she writes about in her new memoir, Destroy This House.

Uhle will celebrate the release of her book and be joined in conversation by Davy Rothbart on Tuesday, August 26, at 6:30 pm at AADL Downtown.

The exploits of Uhle’s parents, Stephen and Sandra Long, sound incredible. Uhle distanced herself when she left for college—and even before then. Yet, what is clear in the memoir is that the family ties were strong, at times humorous, and at other times painful.

Destroy This House starts with the Longs' marriage and Uhle’s birth in the 1970s and continues through her parents’ deaths in the 2010s. The family’s moves involved going from Long Island, New York—not to be confused with “Longs Island,” which is how Uhle references life with her family in the memoir—to Martinsville, Indiana, to Fort Wayne, and later to suburban Detroit. These relocations corresponded with major changes that her parents made.

Uhle characterizes the Longs' lifestyles as pervasive. It is difficult to pick only one story to illustrate how her parents lived because their fraud and avoidance spanned all facets.   

Health: “ ‘We don’t have to drink water.’ Mom spoke slowly, revealing her wisdom. She explained that we could afford to drink Coke, or juice or Tang or whatever else we wanted, and that was better.”

Hoarding: “…Mom grocery shopped as though we were stocking up for war or famine. Around this time, she developed a habit—doubles. If she wanted a box of Bisquick, she’d buy two. She may have only needed a cup and a half out of one of the boxes, but she’d get an extra.”

Responsibilities: “It was noticeable but not weird that they never opened their mail. In the old house, the hot tub had been stacked with unopened lawyers’ office envelopes, and mail at our new house was being stuffed into crevices everywhere, but unless it looked like a check, they would examine it but never open it.”

Financial obligations: When Uhle’s parents ran into trouble with the IRS, they called her to place blame. Uhle writes, “I was breathless defending myself. I felt crushed by guilt. In the course of that call, Dad had turned the real situation into a subverted reality. The real situation was that my parents had not paid or filed taxes for more than a decade, and they owed about $75,000, and all they had to do to get on track was sign the 1040 I’d organized. The version Dad and Mom asked me to believe was that I’d ruined them financially.”

Household repairs: After her father died, Uhle received a distress call from her mother about the freezer not working in her apartment. When she showed up, she saw, “She was right: the freezer door would not close. However, the only thing preventing it from closing was the abundance of things inside it. I removed one box of Eggo waffles and heard the assuring sound of the rubber gasket meeting its frame and sealing.”

These examples demonstrate some of the many ways in which Steve and Sandie abdicated responsibility. Throughout the book, Uhle’s meticulous research on the lives of her parents results in myriad anecdotes and facts proven by records that show the problems her parents created. Her self-awareness of her relationship with her parents and the environment she grew up in brings insights into her parents and how Uhle dealt.

A beacon of hope in the memoir, amidst the Longs' mess and lack of responsibility, is Uhle’s escape. While she saw it through to the end with her parents, she also found her independence and defined how she wants to live. As she was about to go to college, Uhle had a realization:

It occurred to me at some point that summer of 1996 when I turned eighteen, that my parents, like me, were adults. Why hadn’t I considered this before? Why had I spent so much time worrying about their money problems? Cooking their dinners? Vacuuming their floors? Trying to make things right? A little mantra began to click into my thoughts. It’s not my problem, I said in my head. It was a riff, and I began experimenting with it. Spoiled food outside? Black mold infesting our basement for years? These are not actually my responsibility, I reminded myself. Perpetually unpaid bills, unclean house? These are obligations my parents—two adults—have. I don’t have to fix it. In fact, I can’t.

This distinction illuminates her transition from working within her parents’ reality to setting boundaries. As Uhle became a parent to her parents, she carved out her own life, too.

Before her book launch, Uhle and I talked about her memoir, its title, her research for the book, her approach to writing the memoir, and what’s next.

Q: Let’s start with your Ann Arbor connections. You were the executive director of 826michigan for 11 years and are now the executive director and publisher of McSweeney’s. Tell us about your career in writing in Ann Arbor.
A: After a wonderful experience living in Ann Arbor for parts of 1998, I moved to Ann Arbor for good in 2002 and have been really fortunate to have worked at and been part of some of the great cultural institutions here, from The Michigan Theater to the Ann Arbor Art Center to 826michigan. I have such fondness for those places and for some of the other incredible organizations doing creative work—writing and otherwise—here: The Ann Arbor Film Festival, WCBN, and of course the unparalleled Ann Arbor District Library. I am happy to support them all in various ways.

Q: The acknowledgements at the end of the book mention that the title of the book changed based on a suggestion from a friend who read a draft. The title, Destroy This House, is a reference to a recurring dream that you had. How did the title evolve?
A: I don’t know why it stuck, but I was convinced for at least a year and a half that the book should be called Long Island. My parents’ last name was “Long” and quite obviously, I felt a bit isolated living in the weird world of our household. It wasn’t a terrible title, but between the fact that it would have felt like a travel guide to suburban New York City and the fact that two esteemed writers—Colm Tóibín and Taffy Brodesser-Akner—had “Long Island” books emerging around when I was finishing, I knew I had to change it. Fortunately, my friend Phil handed his notes on the manuscript back to me with the new title idea, and he was right.

Q: Destroy This House offers your reflections on how your parents’ actions, including their hoarding, shaped you. Your recurring dream about destroying the houses where you lived with your family as a child eventually included a contrasting vision: “…a second home that was prim and tidy. A place where there was just enough of everything but not too much of anything.” In what ways has writing this book provided you with clarity about your parents’ lives?  
A: I learned a vast amount about my parents in this process—some of it confirmed what I remembered about them, and some was new information I either had never known or not remembered. However, in all that I discovered in my research and writing, I didn’t get any closer to understanding why they behaved the ways they did. They were such outlandish characters that, of course, I wondered what made them that way, and I wondered all the time what motivated them to continue with their exaggerations and strange ways. I dug deep with research and also really examined the emotional aspects of our lives together. The fact is: humans are just unknowable. Part of what makes being a living person such a beguiling and singular enterprise is our endless search for what we can’t know about the people around us.

Q: An example of Stephen and Sandra Long’s approach to life is the story about keeping food outside on the air conditioning unit, referred to as the “outdoor freezer,” in the winter. A passage reads, “We had a problem with the outdoor freezer. Down-on-their-luck locals had discovered our food storage habit and apparently came in the night. Dad insisted it was ‘some homeless guy.’ It had already been established that packaged meat was the first to be nabbed.” Food, finances, fabric, and filth arise as themes, among others. When did you start to see these as themes of the book in addition to conflicts with your parents?   
A: In some ways, I always knew. Plenty of times as a young kid I remember things feeling off or wrong, like when we were eating expired dairy products or the fact that we never had friends over to our house. And simultaneously, I still wonder sometimes about the norms of my parents’ home and occasionally ask myself if they were even weird at all or if I was overreacting. Is it OK to keep food outside in cold weather? It makes a certain sort of sense under the right circumstances. But that was the pernicious weirdness of my parents: they usually started with some sort of behavior that was a slight bit eccentric, and then they doubled down and expanded upon it until it was diabolical and wild and extremely hard to live with or understand. But they’d often be able to point to some totally rational little thing, the way it all began, “The fridge is full and we thought the soup would chill down in the November air.”

By the time I began having a dream about destroying my house, when I was around eight, I think it was pretty clear that I was living in a different world than theirs, or trying to.

Q: You started writing Destroy This House when your parents were alive and then continued writing during “the depths of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic.” Your writing paralleled your extensive research in newspapers, records, correspondence, photographs, and recollections from others to piece together your memories with facts and other accounts. What was this research process like for you? Were there dead ends, surprises, or other disclosures? How did you decide what to include and omit?
A: I did start the very first bits of writing probably 15 years ago, but really, for a long time, I was just keeping my notes and writing essays and journal entries. I always wanted to write about them, but during their lives and in the years immediately afterward, I hadn’t yet sorted out how to do it. They were dauntingly complex people. About a year into the pandemic, a guiding question struck me: Did all of the things I remember about my parents really happen? I never wanted to write a whiny screed about their faults, nor did I want to shrug off their problems with a cheerful take. I actually wanted to know the truth about who they were and how they lived. I let that investigative question guide the writing, and the research part felt so satisfying that, in the end, it felt integral to the narrative. And I left out a lot. Some of what I remember and what I learned about them just didn’t flow with the text, or would have needed additional context to make sense. I only had about 100,000 words in which to tell the story of an expansive and complicated 40-some years, so naturally the book comprises only a fraction of the whole—the fraction that felt most important, resonant, and true.

Q: While research provides facts, your parents mixed or obscured fact and fiction. The book’s prologue says, “We were the Longs, and we lived on Longs Island. We shaped the truth to evade consequences, and we definitely also lied for fun.” To a large extent, Steve and Sandie said what they wanted to and did what served them. While reading Destroy This House, I thought, how adeptly you convey the depth of your parents’ problems—and the effects on them and you—while avoiding openly criticizing them for their choices. How did you settle on this journalistic approach to telling the story?
A: The most important thing to me was to tell the truth in this memoir. Reflecting on things that we did together, houses we lived in, jobs my dad held, and many other details of the '80s and '90s, I found a lot of implausibility. My parents were both fabulists, and they would never have wanted their exaggerations challenged. But the longer my parents were gone from this world, the more difficult it was to pin down the actual features of their lives—some of the things they did and said are really unbelievable. Writing this book was a process for me of tracking down provable facts about my parents and connecting those, with as little embellishment as possible, to a narrative threaded together with my memories. It’s so easy to blame difficult people, and equally easy to gloss over tough situations. It was a profound challenge to tell the whole truth to the best of my ability and let the stranger-than-fiction facts stand alone.

Q: As we wrap up, what is on your stack to read?
A: We publish a lot of incredible fiction at McSweeney’s, and I just finished and am still awed by Joanna Howard’s Porthole—a filmic and addictively readable meditation on what it means to make art. And I can’t wait for readers to discover our November release by Kevin Moffet. Only Son is an unforgettable, extremely intimate excavation of fatherhood. I’m also eagerly awaiting Peter Orner’s The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter, which isn’t published by McSweeney’s, but Peter writes for us sometimes. All novels here; contemporary fiction is always the bread and butter of my reading pile.  

Q: What is next for you and your writing?
A: One thing I’ve absolutely never been able to do in my career or life is make a coherent plan. I think some very successful people set goals and work to achieve them, but I am somehow not built that way. Over and over in my life, I have always sought the next thing that felt right in my life and followed that gut feeling. So I have no specific plans at all. But that feels exactly right.

Martha Stuit is a former reporter and current librarian.  

Amanda Uhle will be in conversation with Davy Rothbart to celebrate the release of "Destroy This House" on Tuesday, August 26, at 6:30 pm at the Ann Arbor District Library, 343 South Fifth Avenue.