Many of us have been—or will be—called upon to clean out the home of a loved one or cull our own possessions when moving or downsizing. When the antique-dealer parents of writer and professor Julia Ridley Smith passed away, they left behind a house chock full of furniture, books, artifacts, and paper. Smith wrote about the huge task of going through it all in her first book The Sum of Trifles. Her thoughtful, tender, and often funny memoir explores
the strange magic of objects,
what they mean to us, and
how hard it can be to let them go.
Smith... discusses how material culture shapes our identities, and how we often think of our possessions as defining who we are and even what we can do.
She talks about the challenges of tackling a house clean-out when grief makes it difficult to give up cherished objects. While the topic can feel heavy, she approaches it with humor, reminding us that there’s also room during a house cleanout for finding joy, discovery, and human connection.
There are layers of meaning surrounding specific objects her parents owned... and she turns to literature that illuminates how her inheritance shaped her notions of identity and purpose. It's a curious, thoughtful look at how we live in and with our material culture and how we face our losses as we decide what to keep and what to let go. A wonderful exploration of grief and the joy left behind.
What does it mean to reckon with the trifles and treasures left behind by her parents, former antique store owners and perennial, opinionated collectors?
An examination of profound loss,
first the loss of beloved parents,
then the loss of the world they created, and
then, by extension, the loss of the myths that world embraced.
This is for lovers and wranglers of ephemera, for amateur epistemologists, and for incorrigible musers.
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