Boston Terrier Collectibles Book

In some ways this memoir strikes me as the most naked kind of confessional, as if the author, instead of being a collector, were a professional masturbator, or someone who wove carpets from the hair of all the women he dated. It is a memoir steeped in shame and pathology, yet also normalness, since the type of collecting and acquiring done here is both an attempt to fill emptiness and compensate for emotional wounds, and a path to self-definition - "a way of sketching the world and my place in it." This is not hoarding in the strictest sense: King doesn't live among canyons of teetering newspapers and garbage, but curates his collections with obsessive care; over the past 25 years he has filled 83 binders with food and consumer products labels, and this is just one of his many collections. Other smaller ones are teabag tags, expired credit cards and library cards, illustrations cut from old dictionaries and pasted onto paper. The book's cover shows a page from his binder containing security envelope linings. He is acutely aware of the low utility and limited aesthetic appeal of his collections, of the lost hours spent accumulating them ("life marches on, while collectors trail behind, carrying a shovel and a sack"). Yet he also recognizes their congruity with art - the way art and collecting both share elements of curation, of synthesis, of animating found objects (Joseph Cornell's boxes were a source of inspiration for him as a youth).

It also feels like a naked confessional, as we learn late in the book, because King's health insurance plan has stopped paying for his therapy sessions. He has discontinued his retail therapy and the book is his "homemade" continuation of it (though not necessarily the end of his collecting). I felt equal measures of empathy and horror reading it, which was well-expressed by Henry Alford's review in the New York Times: "I wanted, by turns, to breast-feed and strangle him."

King, a professor of theater at UC Santa Barbara, writes poetically. I enjoyed this charmingly cruel bit of name-dropping from his days as a student at the Yale School of Drama:

"...I was turned to dust by a simpering, snorting aerobics instructor, an iota named John Guare. He always called himself "the world's oldest promising playwright," and the world treated him well and not too well accordingly. To me, he was the world's worst teacher, and I was his worst student, and he treated me badly and very badly accordingly. There was a jerky rhythm in his step that said, "I really need this teaching job," and also, "I really need to make them think I don't need this teaching job," and also, "I really need to learn to like teaching," and also, "I don't!" It was like he was running away from us, to us, over us, all at once....He torqued his upper body, to right, to left, jazzercising in a sweatless-Hamptons-boat-society way, Izod draped across his slack gut....He needed always to see himself better in his students, not to see his students better in themselves. He ran his comb through his hair to make sure we were never a tangle, never a stray..."