Eileen Stukane's heart-in-throat account of entering the toxic hell of her deceased cousin's floor-to-ceiling-cluttered, stench-emanating house -- which she had once known as elegant and orderly -- is the beginning of a mystery that she probes and solves in this exquisite, un-put-down-able book. She and her sister Ellen go through every one of the thousands of items in the house: discarding, appraising, sifting the gold from the dross: a herculean, heartful task that took a full year. What makes a hoarder? What clues exist in the house, hidden under the thousands of "dust-blanketed, hard-to-identify objects" that preserve memories of her aunt, uncle and two cousins? What does one do when one finds a hoarder in one's midst? She takes on the pathology of this disorder -- with empathy, stringence, and love.

Sheila Weller, Author of Girls Like Us; Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon---and the Journey of a Generation

Eileen Stukane has written a thoughtful and sensitive memoir that is a cautionary tale of unbridled attachment to objects. Over the course of a year, she and her sister cleared the hoarded home of a loved one. In the process she uncovered and then discovered what lay beneath the mountains of stuff: isolation, loneliness, and suffering.

Michael A. Tompkins, PhD, ABPP, author of Digging Out: Helping Your Loved One Manage Clutter, Hoarding, and Compulsive Acquiring

Why can't you let go of that old, chipped mug? What hold does it have on you? And why do those worn shirts, long past their prime, feel impossible to give away? In The House That Held Everything, Eileen Stukane inherits more than a home-she steps into a hidden world thick with dust and silence. Batteries, Nutcracker dolls, model train magazines-these aren't just forgotten objects. They're fragments of lives, locked in time. As Stukane navigates the hoarded rooms of her family's past, she becomes a kind of forensic soul-searcher, who uncovers buried truths one artifact at a time. What begins as a simple inheritance unravels into a haunting exploration of memory, identity, and the things we hold onto without knowing why, until now...the powerful bond between people and their possessions fills the air in The House That Held Everything.

David Zinczenko, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Zero Belly Diet and the co-author of the Eat This, Not That! series

We often hear that we live in a 'throw-away-society'. This book reminds us of the other extreme of consumer society: when collecting becomes hoarding. A moving account of the comfort and pain of things and what their accumulation reveals about a family's secrets.

Frank Trentmann, author of Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the 15th century to the 21st