The New Yorker, April 9, 2012

My first short story for this magazine, back in 1993, was a piece called “Filthy with Things.” It concerns a couple so caught up in the mania of collecting and acquiring that they find their living space reduced to the odd trail wending its way through the mountains of precious stuff wedged inside their house. Finally, in desperation, they hire a professional organizer by the name of Susan Certaine, who solves the problem by hauling away everything but the standing walls and the clothes on their backs. To this day, people come up to me, their eyes shifting furtively and hands compressed in adjuration, to confess how deeply the story gnaws at them—this is true horror, and it needs no vampires or zombies to bring home its queasy truths.