Grab a Coca-Cola, your favorite Pop-Tart, and settle in for a guided tour of an astonishing family journey as told by the daughter in the Long family.
Amanda Uhle’s debut memoir, “Destroy This House,” is an examination of her unusual upbringing as she and her brother Adam moved with their parents through 10 houses in five states, outrunning a trail of debt and destruction during the 1980s and ’90s.
Sandie and Stephen Long’s marriage was marked by deceptions from the get-go, things that should’ve torn them asunder, but instead seemed to carry them through good times and bad, for richer and poorer, in sickness and health. Through a succession of job changes, a don’t-open-the-mail approach to bill paying, abrupt moves to and from a string of increasingly cluttered abodes, Uhle recounts with humor and remarkable detail the unstable circumstances of her youth. The Longs lived by a perplexing tangle of unspoken rules anchored by the admonishment to never invite the neighbors over.
“We didn’t share what was happening in our house with anyone, which I know sounds really dark, but it wasn’t an abusive home. It had its own ecosystem and norms and it was gross inside and it was shameful in a lot of ways,” Uhle said in a phone interview from her current home in Michigan, where she lives with her husband and teenage daughter.
Uhle, currently executive director and publisher of McSweeney’s, is also a journalist who has written for The Washington Post, Boston Globe and other outlets. Her research is thorough, and her writing evocative of a time period that will spark nostalgia in readers who also lived through those consumer-driven decades in mostly white Christian communities like Martinsville, Ind., and Downriver, Mich.
The Long family homes were sometimes surrounded by waist-high lawns. Inside, the constant zuzz of Sandie’s sewing machine and nonstop TV noise created the soundtrack, but the hallmark of every house they lived in was the smell. Expiring food that couldn’t fit inside the overstuffed refrigerator and freezer sat spoiling on the counter, growing mold and attracting flies. It was an issue that Amanda’s father joked about but tolerated, as a supportive husband completely backed by a dedicated wife. “They accepted each other, and you could say they enabled each other. They were a little bit Bonnie and Clyde in that they stuck together and were just gonna do what they were gonna do,” Uhle recalled.
Amanda (affectionately nicknamed “Buickface” after forceps smooshed her newborn head into a square) grew up having recurring dreams of destroying her family homes, which she found nearly unbearable the older she got. But the book is not an exercise in posthumous punishment for irresponsible parenting. It’s an effort to make sense of what her parents were up to, and track down any remaining evidence of their antics through court records, newspaper articles, emails and letters. The Longs died a decade ago.
“Just bringing them to life on the page was really fun. Even though I had what a lot of people, including me, describe as a complicated and kind of difficult time with my parents … it was a wonderful way to carry their lives forward a little bit,” Uhle said.
The book is a visual read, even though the only photograph is the cover image: a blurry 1985 snapshot of Amanda on Easter morning outside their Long Island home. In those days, Amanda spent most of her time indoors, playing with her imaginary friend Himbee, hilariously named after a misunderstood line in the Sunday school song “Yes Jesus Loves Me.”
During their wealthiest years, the family lived in a mansion on a golf course. It was around then that she began to notice how differently her friend’s homes were kept.
The family became regular church-goers; Stephen eventually enrolled in seminary after a string of sales jobs, including his most lucrative as inventor of a soap dispenser that earned him big bucks from Swedish buyers. Sandie took up nursing to fund her shopping addiction, while Amanda often had to hand over her babysitting money to keep the family fed.
Uhle doesn’t play the victim. “They were truly extraordinary people. They did unusual things. They were complicated. They were loving. They were weird. They were lots of things that are very hard to describe, especially briefly. And so I really wanted to write as true an account as I could of who they were and to be able to hold it for longer than my memory would hold.”
DESTROY THIS HOUSE
Author: Amanda Uhle
Pages: 352
Publisher: S&S/Summit Books