Fantastically entertaining —Isaac Fitzgerald
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Destined to become a classic —Ada Calhoun
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An iconic, only-in-America fable —Dave Eggers
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Confessional, vulnerable, honest, and scintillating. —Hannah Pittard
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Poignant, wryly funny, and exquisitely written. —Erika Krouse
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Fantastically entertaining —Isaac Fitzgerald • Destined to become a classic —Ada Calhoun • An iconic, only-in-America fable —Dave Eggers • Confessional, vulnerable, honest, and scintillating. —Hannah Pittard • Poignant, wryly funny, and exquisitely written. —Erika Krouse •
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.
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 author—a Gen-Xer whose indomitable spirit will be as familiar to readers as her cassette mixtapes—artfully excavates both her n'er-do-well parents' decaying home and her own furious compassion.
—Ada Calhoun, NYT bestselling author of Also a Poet
A fantastically entertaining tale of two of the most endearing grifters ever committed to print—who happen to be the author’s parents.
—Isaac Fitzgerald, NYT bestselling author of Dirtbag, Massachusetts
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 of Tell Me Everything
An iconic, only-in-America fable of desperate Midwestern dreamers.
—Dave Eggers
Amanda Uhle’s 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 of Devil in the Details: Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood
Confessional, vulnerable, honest, and scintillating. I loved every word.
—Hannah Pittard, author of If You Love It, Let It Kill You
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 writer’s life.
—Adrienne Brodeur, bestselling author of Wild Game: My Mother, Her Love, and Me and Little Monsters