When Your Parents Are Hoarders with Amanda Uhle
So Your Parents Are Old
Vanessa Grigoriadis
4.5 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 4 November 2025
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Amanda Uhle, writer and publisher of McSweeney’s, joins Vanessa to talk about her new book Destroy This House. She reflects on her parents’ lifelong struggles with hoarding and the lessons she carried forward after clearing the home they left behind.
To connect with the team, find us on Instagram and Youtube, or shoot us an email at soyourparentsareold@gmail.com. We want to hear from you!
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey everyone, thank you so much for listening to my podcast. I hope you are getting something out of it, |
| 0:07.3 | because I definitely am. And I just wanted to let you know if you want to join the So Your Parents are |
| 0:13.1 | old community, you can head over to joinPparents.com. You'll get updates on our episodes, |
| 0:27.7 | behind-the-scenes access, and more. That's joinparents.com. Thanks again. |
| 0:37.7 | I was like, well, it's pretty messy. Like I was trying to find the words for like, what is it like in my mom's apartment? Because it was really bad. And I don't know if I used the word hoarding. We never did. When I was a kid, it was like so |
| 0:43.4 | pejorative and didn't feel like something my parents would do. |
| 0:52.1 | Hello, everybody, and welcome back to So Your Parents Are Old. |
| 0:57.5 | Thank you so much for joining us again this week. |
| 1:00.3 | And we have a wonderful writer here, Amanda Yule, and she has just released a book called |
| 1:06.5 | Destroy This House, which is about her parents, her experience growing up with them, which was |
| 1:13.1 | quite strange, and handling all the things that happened when they got old. |
| 1:19.6 | She's also the publisher of a wonderful outlet, I guess you could say, called McSweeney's, |
| 1:25.8 | which has been around for a while, which publishes all sorts of sort of experimental fiction and nonfiction and has been, you know, a fixture on the publishing scene and is something that is so wonderful. And I hope everybody can check it out. We'll also have a link to it in our show notes along with a link to Amanda's |
| 1:45.7 | book. So welcome Amanda. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. I'm excited |
| 1:50.7 | about your new podcast. Thank you. Me as well. I mean, something has to come out of this whole |
| 1:56.8 | experience of caring for your somewhat decayed parents that is uplifting and something |
| 2:04.1 | you can share with the world and also maybe a little sad and, you know, something that other |
| 2:09.0 | people can empathize with. And that's what your book is as well. Well, it's so common what you |
| 2:14.0 | just talked about caring for your parents. And it's so hard. It's often so, so challenging. |
| 2:18.9 | So I'm glad you're doing this. |
| 2:20.2 | Yeah, I think people feel really alone. |
| 2:22.5 | So it's nice to have a forum where we can share. |
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