Collections of Nothing, by William Davies King
At the start of this memoir, the author, a college professor in California, describes a scene from his divorce. He walks into the garage of his former family house, and looks at his possessions, which his wife has put there. He sees the stuff you’d expect — the shirts, the tools, the ‘bags of shoes’. And he also sees his collection. This is the subject of this book, and it’s pretty weird, because this guy is a ‘collector of nothing’. He’s an obsessive collector of junk. And when he looks at this junk, in this garage, he has a moment of clarity. He realises how weird he is. ‘These things looked like signs of hoarding,’ he says, ‘which is a diagnosis, not a hobby.’
This book, then, is an attempt, by a middle-aged man who has just suffered a mid-life crisis, to explain his obsession with collecting junk. When I say junk, I mean serious junk — he has, he tells us early on, 43 labels from tins of tuna. Or rather, he doesn’t tell us how many he has; he lists them, alphabetically, from Albertson’s Solid White Tuna to Vons Chunk Light Tuna. ‘Middle-class life,’ he says, ‘is also a collection.’ The things that middle-class people collect are houses, cars, children and respectability. This guy, on the other hand, collects envelopes, biscuit boxes, and bags that have contained cauliflowers — among many, many other things.
He tells us the story of his life. He grew up in Ohio, the son of a doctor. Named William Davies King, after his father, he became Dave to his father’s Bill. Dave had an older sister and two younger brothers. The sister was disabled. There was intense, toxic sibling rivalry between Dave and his sister.
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