CUSPER MAGAZINE / MARA WOODS
Commissioned series Cusper Magazine. Photo essay for Mara Woods' piece about losing her mom and coping with her own hoarding addiction.
Published Summer 2025.
“Up until a few years ago, my childhood home was storage grounds for every single newspaper and New Yorker magazine that had been delivered to its address since my parents moved there in 1993, every printout, flyer, or piece of mail (including envelopes) that had enough white space left on it to be used as “scrap paper” for “taking notes”; at least three thousand dollars in brand new Costco purchases my mom had meant to return but “hadn’t gotten around to;” various items of furniture she had scavenged from the street and then unceremoniously forgotten about; moth-eaten clothing kept as cleaning rags, arts-and-craft supplies of all pedigrees, including the sticks from popsicles I had eaten in 1998, and crates of Christmas decorations we hadn’t touched since the hoarding had taken over our living room, choking out any possibility of a Christmas tree…
As a child, I felt trapped in my mom’s house amid her piles of junk. Everything seemed out of her control: she had lost years of her life and alienated the people closest to her. Hoarding gave her an artificial sense of control—a level of control she could only have over inanimate objects, never people, because objects couldn’t fight back.”
– Mara Woods