American Bulk
Essays on Excess
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2024
Raised with hoarding and compulsive shopping, Emily Mester is caught in between. What happens when consumption begins to consume you back?
In a series of deeply personal essays, Mester explores how the things we buy, eat, amass, and discard become an intimate part of our lives. We guiltily watch Amazon boxes pile up on the porch, wade through endless reviews to find the perfect product, and crave the comforting indulgence of a chain restaurant. With humor and sharp intellect, Mester reflects on the joys and anxieties of Costco trips, how a seasonal stint at Ulta Beauty taught her the insidious art of the sale, and what it means to get “mall sad.” In a nuanced examination of diet culture and fatness, Mester recounts her teenage summer at fat camp and the unexpected liberation she finds there. Finally, she ventures to Storm Lake, Iowa, to reckon with her grandmother’s abandoned hoard, excavating the dysfunction that lies at the heart of her family’s obsession with stuff. American Bulk introduces readers to a striking new literary talent from the American heartland, one who dares to ask us to regard consumption not with guilt but with grace and empathy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mester blends memoir and cultural criticism to investigate "privileged accumulation," both within her family and across American culture, in her unfocused debut. In nine wry, disaffected first-person essays, Mester writes of her frugal grandmother's hoarding, her wealthy father's compulsive shopping, and well-covered emblems of contemporary consumption including Costco and Yelp. Throughout, she lands pithy punches ("Other chains were cheap in both cost and aesthetics.... Olive Garden, on the other hand, took its mediocrity seriously") that stop short of trenchant, owing, in part, to the book's stubborn lack of an overarching argument. "Live, Laugh, Lose" is a vivid account of Mester's time attending a Pennsylvania fat camp that grows more diffuse as it goes, resisting, in the end, either endorsement or condemnation of the program. "While Supplies Last" first attempts to analyze the allure of sweepstakes, then swerves into an undercooked assessment of mall-induced malaise, before ending with a rhetorical shrug. On a sentence level, Mester writes with considerable skill: the collection's final essay, "Storm Lake, Part 3," in which she travels to her grandmother's long-abandoned Iowa home to find its mess eerily intact, brims with memorable imagery. Still, her observations cry out for a firmer organizing principle. While occasionally stirring, this lands with a whimper.
