There, following two unsuccessful surgeries to correct her scoliosis, Miller’s mother sinks into depression where she discovers the Home Shopping Network, and soon becomes an accomplice to Miller’s father. But when the house on Long Island burns down, the little family reunites into its familiar trinity, and Miller’s parents use the insurance money to buy an even larger place, again on Long Island. Whenever the family enacted its ritual argument, Miller’s mother would rail against her husband’s accumulating mess, he would walk out the door and Miller would rage at her mother to deflect her greatest fear - that her father would degenerate into a faceless street person sitting on a park bench beside bulging plastic bags.Įventually Miller’s mother leaves her father and takes Miller to Brooklyn to live with her own mother. The hoarding begins with Miller’s father, a dreamy man who “loved everything in the world so much that he had to live with it all,” and whose behavior flips Miller into the role of protector. Throughout the book, Miller tries to reconcile her shame over her parents with disgust at herself for being ashamed of two flawed but loving people. Beginning with her early childhood on Long Island, the story continues through the squalid conditions of her teen years, an attempted suicide in college, and her outwardly successful but nightmarishly beset inner life as a young actress. “I believed,” Miller writes “that my parents loved me into living, that the three of us were meant to be a family, and that I was going to be a miracle, if I could only figure out how.”Ĭoming Clean is the story of Miller’s struggle to perform that miracle. Miller’s father, wounded by his own parents’ alcoholism, and her mother, who suffers from scoliosis, open their common bond of pain just enough to admit Kimberly Rae when she’s born three months prematurely. Hoarding, the first, has only recently entered the popular lexicon while the second, familial love, spans the ages. At the heart of Coming Clean, a memoir by Kimberly Rae Miller, lie two equally mysterious phenomena, one as timely as the other is timeless.

Coming Clean by Kimberly Rae Miller