Coming Clean: A Memoir Author: Visit Amazon's Kimberly Rae Miller Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0544025830 | Format: PDF
Coming Clean: A Memoir Description
Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, July 2013: Most children who grow up in dysfunctional families don’t realize at first they’re any different from anybody else—but Kimberly Rae Miller is more observant than most; from childhood, she had a growing sense that there was something wrong in her household. A brilliant guy who ended up driving a bus, Miller’s father was an extreme hoarder, and the family’s normal-from-the-outside (at least for a while) Long Island home was a mess (or treasure trove, depending on your point of view) of useless (or fascinating) papers and junk (important stuff). In
Coming Clean, Miller, an actor and writer, chronicles her weird childhood and adolescence, but what’s really unusual about this buoyant, winning memoir is that for all that the author describes the familial dysfunction in heartbreaking, copious detail—and for all that she sometimes lost patience with her parents—she never stops showing that she loves them. As readers we come to love them, too—partly because, whatever else, they managed to raise such a smart and witty and generous daughter. —
Sara Nelson From Publishers Weekly
An only child to loving parents who were such chronic hoarders that they had to flee their over-stuffed Long Island house rather than face cleaning it, actress and journalist Miller delineates her harrowing childhood and secretive home life. Miller's bus driver father, a brilliant, however emotionally remote man, collected papers and broken electronics, while Miller's government-employed mother was a twin whose untreated childhood scoliosis left her shrunken and with a low sense of self-worth, although fiercely devoted to her daughter. Home life spelled a weird combination of obsession and inertia—collected stuff and unused purchases were piled so high that little room was left for the family even to eat or sleep or use the bathrooms; and filth and mold invited rodents As a child Miller realized her family wasn't like other people's families with tidy, presentable homes; far from it. A fire destroyed one home when she was in second grade, while the large house they moved into was soon rendered similarly uninhabitable, so that Miller never invited anyone home and had to adopt a decoy house to be dropped off at by friends. Eventually she went to college at Emerson in Boston where she kept a clean living space, as she did when she later moved to L.A. and New York City. The reader senses in this horrific story that Miller is still tiptoeing around her family's dirty secret and hardly revealing the half of it. Agent: Mollie Glick, Foundry Literary + Media. (July)
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- Hardcover: 272 pages
- Publisher: New Harvest (July 23, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0544025830
- ISBN-13: 978-0544025837
- Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
- Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
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