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.
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