An Interview with Carrie Lane

Ilana Gershon: How did you first get the idea for this research?

Carrie Lane: There were two different starting points. The first was when I was writing my dissertation, which became my first book on high tech unemployment. Most of the high-tech workers I interviewed wanted to go back into tech jobs, but one woman told me she was done with tech, and instead she wanted to start her own business as a personal concierge. She said, I want to be a stay-at-home mom for working moms. This was in 2001. Her idea was that she’d take the dog to the vet and get groomed, and she would get your groceries and buy your gifts for Christmas. And all the stuff that sort of fell to the wayside because you’re so busy at work. And I just sort of put a pin in it mentally. And thought, oh, that sounds like a really interesting occupation to consider going into. And I didn’t know of a name for it at the time.

Then, years later, in a very separate context, I was going through the mugs in our kitchen, and I pulled out a few mugs that I was going to get rid of and donate to Goodwill, and I was so proud of myself. I just felt lighter and happier. And, you know, I was just getting rid of mugs! As a cultural critic, that was the moment where I stopped and thought, “Oh no, like something’s going on here, if I think I’m living a happier, better life, because I have three fewer mugs.” And I decided I wanted to investigate that feeling, that decluttering makes us better, happier people with better lives. I knew that idea had to be interrogated. So that’s it. That’s where I started.

Ilana Gershon: What was the fieldwork like?  How did you make connections?  Which of your fieldwork strategies made immediate sense to professional organizers?  I want to also know what did shadowing professional organizers let you know and what were the limitations of this? What did you need to supplement the shadowing?

Carrie Lane: Long before I even thought I might do fieldwork with professional organizers, my older sister was struggling a bit with household stuff — having a small home, working, and raising a young child.  She was trying to fit everything in. I wanted to help so I reached out to a professional organizer about maybe working with her. That never ended up happening. But the organizer’s name stayed with me.  They were working in the LA area, and so years later when I decided to start this project, she was one of the first organizers I reached out to, just because I knew of her. And then honestly, I turned to Google. I Googled a lot and I looked for organizers who were promoting their business in LA in an interesting way.

 I was just going to do a couple of preliminary interviews.  But my two preliminary interviews were just so rich and wonderful. They are used so much in this book.  And I knew after those interviews that I wanted to continue with this as a project. And it’s funny because initially I thought that the organizers would be a third of the book. I wanted the book to be a cultural history of ideas about clutter. And I wanted to write a historical chapter and then a pop culture chapter and then a chapter on organizers. But I should have known better. Work is what I’m most excited to study. And so as soon as I talked to the organizers, I thought: oh, forget the rest. Thankfully, Katherine Feo Kelly did a lot of the historical work I decided not to do in a dissertation that is not published but should be.  It is really great, and I cite it a lot in the book.

I just focused on the organizers. I reached out to folks who looked interesting. I went to NAPO (National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals) meetings and announced that I was looking for folks to interview. People were generous with their time and then they’d say, oh, if you’re interested in this, you’ve got to talk to this person or that one. I would also look at media pieces and if I saw an organizer say interesting, kind of unexpected stuff in a news article, I would then reach out to them, even if they were in another city, and see about interviewing them.

You also asked about the workalongs. I did over a hundred hours of unpaid assistant work for professional organizers. And it was my favorite part of the job just because it’s so voyeuristic.  It is like being an ethnographer, you are inside people’s lives and you’re getting to see what is going on with them. One of the key things I learned from doing this was how different organizing on the ground looks like from what you see on television.  In most ways, it’s just incredibly different. It is slow, it is emotional, it is much more intimate. Organizers are not stern task masters. They’re much more empathetic, supportive, disabuse-you-of-unrealistic-expectations-for-yourself. But there were limits to workalongs.  As I look back on the project, the problem with using workalongs for my participant observation was that I really don’t have a great deal of insight into the client’s experience in the organizing process. I focused more on the organizers and the labor involved in it. Yes, I interviewed some clients and then of course I’ve met and chatted with the clients that we worked with, but I can’t speak as much to the clients’ perspectives.

Ilana Gershon: I’m also curious: did studying professional organizers affect how you organized your own things?

Carrie Lane: Oh my God, I canceled my New Yorker subscription. That’s what I did, that was the first thing I did. I have a little magazine stand in the bathroom and I would read New Yorker magazines in my free time, but you can’t keep up, there’s so many of them. But I love the New Yorker. But all those New Yorkers formed a scolding pile of shoulds. You should have read this one, you should be reading this and you should go through it. I just decided I’m done. I went to an organizer’s lecture atthe Los Angeles LGBT Senior Center.  The organizer was giving a lecture and she just recommended that everyone should free themselves from all the shoulds — I should use this, I should do this, I should read this.

And I went home and I just took the whole pile of magazines, I put them in the recycling bin, and I canceled my subscription. It was painful, but I’ve never looked back.

I buy a lot less for the home. I don’t think I bought a ton before, but now I can wander through the aisles of TJ Maxx and all the Home Goods stores and buy not a single thing. I don’t need another frame, I don’t need another lamp. I don’t need any of those things. I tend to be pretty mercenary in evaluating what I’m actually going to bring into my home. I didn’t do the whole Kon-Mari method process thing, but I did borrow a few tips from her that I like a lot.

I think I mentioned in the book that my son’s socks are nestled into little boxes. I take old cardboard boxes from anything, and especially any Apple packaging. Their boxes are really nice. I love a good cardboard box, which I think is funny since the book is called More Than Pretty Boxes. I put the boxes in drawers to help corral things. I would never buy an organizing product if I can make something myself that functions the same way. So I think that’s how it impacted my house.

Ilana Gershon: What were some of the challenges in writing the book?

Carrie Lane: I don’t love writing, Ilana. That was a challenge. I love having written. It’s like going to the gym. I don’t like going to the gym. I love having gone. I started the fieldwork in 2012, and then I had a child in 2014.  I was and still am teaching at a campus with a pretty heavy teaching load. I decided to just put the book aside for a few years, and focus on that rare fleeting period of babyness, which I’m completely glad I did. But at the same time, there wasn’t a day during those years that I didn’t feel guilty that I wasn’t working on the book.

Ilana Gershon: Oh no.

Carrie Lane: I know, I know.

Ilana Gershon: You lied to me. You told me that you did not feel guilty.

Carrie Lane: There must have been days I didn’t feel guilty.

Ilana Gershon: Whenever I saw you at the AAA, you were so happy and would tell me: “I don’t feel guilty at all.”

Carrie Lane: Maybe I’m rewriting my own narrative and adding mom guilt in. I take it out. I didn’t feel at all guilty. Ask Ilana. I did not feel guilty at all.  But I owed a book to the organizers. I really wanted to make this book happen. And I was already a tenured full professor. I didn’t have to publish for any other reason. But I wanted to bring the story out into the world; they were so generous with their time and insights. I wanted to do it. So that was hard. And then, as I mentioned in the book, then along the way, my husband nearly died and was in the ICU for four months on life support. There was a good year and a half where there was no writing. And that was frustrating, but necessary. That one wasn’t a choice, that’s just you do what you need to do to get by.

As with my first book, I think I’m frustrated it didn’t come out earlier, but I think it’s a much better book because it didn’t come out earlier. I really had time to mull. And then I had wonderful reviewers.  You read a version for me, Ilana, an early version, and really gave me just invaluable advice. And then there was also new work coming out, Katie’s work included. There was new work coming out that really helped me think in new ways about what I had been seeing. And so I’m grateful for the time, but those were the challenges. The challenges were not the project. The project itself was always fun. I loved the research. I mean after you write books on unemployment, it’s delightful to write a book about organizing because it’s just much more enjoyable. There’s hefty stuff in there, but they’re fun people doing interesting things that they are hoping make people’s lives better. And that’s a pleasure.

Ilana Gershon: I want to ask one last question — what story do you love that you didn’t get to include?

Carrie Lane: There was a story about a job. I did not work this job technically. It was a client with hoarding issues and the client no longer lived in the home. She had ended up hospitalized and was not going to be able to come back to the home. So the organizer, who was in her late seventies at the time, was just doing it in the client’s absence. The client had taken what [belongings] they wanted for their new assisted living facility and left everything else.

It was a home that she had been living in for 30 or 40 years. And it was unbelievable. It was what you see on TV in the hoarding shows.  It was the only job like this that I was even able to see because the woman would never see the house again. Those jobs are so delicate, that wouldn’t be a job an organizer would invite me to join as an untrained assistant. So I didn’t work those jobs. But I was allowed to walk through this woman’s house because she was living elsewhere, and I was allowed just to see what had been accumulated. And there was a walk-in closet that was full of candy that was just garbage bag after garbage bag after garbage bag of unopened bags of candy, some candy was 20 or 30 years old. There were kitchen cabinets that had just cobwebs all over all the food in them– they were packed with canned food. And I thought about this when I was choosing which organizing stories to include. I thought about whether to include it, but I felt it leaned so far into the kinds of narratives I was trying to avoid. It felt a bit like that kind of before and after organizer porn, and I talked about how organizers are really ambivalent about these kinds of stories. Also I was worried about the representation of hoarding, especially without having a human to anchor the story around. It just felt a little exploitative. And so I left that story out.

Author Bio

Ilana Gershon is the Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Anthropology.  She has published books such as Down and Out in the New Economy ( Chicago), The Pandemic Workplace (Chicago) and has edited three other volumes of ethnographic fiction on work, animals, and monsters.  Currently, with Sarah Green, she is surfacing an emerging theoretical movement in anthropology that assumes everyone lives among multiple social orders, and endeavor to form boundaries between these differentiated social orders that are stable and yet porous enough to allow people, objects, forms, and ideas to circulate in appropriate ways.