the gentle swedish art of death cleaning

My mother, a widow, is, suffice to say, not a natural death cleaner. Then your inner Buddhist emerges, and all that stuff suddenly seems just that: stuff, no longer essential and devoid of talismanic power. At that point, more-real estate, kitchen equipment, books, boats, bicycles-is more.

(One couple I know call each other Inventory-the mother who orders diapers, toys, baby supplies-and Outventory-the father who eagerly consigns every possible thing to the trash.) In my experience, the urge to amass peaks somewhere in your children’s early teens. The calculus of accumulating, churning, and shedding is a big part of the domestic juggling act, particularly if you have children, who seem to grow in and out of needs by the week. Before your kids have to empty out your bedroom, Magnusson writes, “Save your favorite dildo-but throw out the other fifteen.”) That’s the “gentle” in the art: Magnusson’s is a soothing, grandmotherly voice. Describing her own age as “between 80 and 100,” she advocates a methodical, thoughtful process, perusing the contents of each room in your home at your own pace before deciding whether to gift, recycle, ditch, etc. Where Kondo advises an all-or-nothing approach, noting that clearing up bit by bit would take you the rest of your life, Magnusson appears to have the rest of her life to do it. (To avoid car sickness, I ordered her a copy.)ĭespite its macabre title, the book, published this month, is sweeping a rapid path up the best-seller lists, perhaps because-like buying innumerable boxes at The Container Store, as I frequently do-thinking about tidying up is much more pleasant than actually doing it.Īfter the long supremacy of Marie Kondo, Magnusson’s is the slow-food version of organizing. She agreed to return it only if I read the last section to her on the drive back to the airport. I knew Margareta Magnusson was onto something when the friend I was spending the weekend with-herself of Scandinavian heritage and very good at pruning her living spaces-whipped Magnusson’s book, The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, out of my hand as soon as I arrived at her house.

The gentle swedish art of death cleaning