Fantastically entertaining —Isaac Fitzgerald
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Destined to become a classic —Ada Calhoun
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An iconic, only-in-America fable —Dave Eggers
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Confessional, vulnerable, honest, and scintillating. —Hannah Pittard
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Poignant, wryly funny, and exquisitely written. —Erika Krouse
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Fantastically entertaining —Isaac Fitzgerald • Destined to become a classic —Ada Calhoun • An iconic, only-in-America fable —Dave Eggers • Confessional, vulnerable, honest, and scintillating. —Hannah Pittard • Poignant, wryly funny, and exquisitely written. —Erika Krouse •
Forthcoming from Summit Books, August 2025.
Preorder. Read an interview with the author.
Playlists on Spotify & Apple Music.
Amanda Uhle’s parents—a charismatic wheeler-dealer and a striving fashion designer—preside over a late twentieth century family like no other. Their love is fierce, their lifestyle bizarre, and their deceptions countless. Destroy this House is their tender, heartbreaking, hilarious and wholly original story.
Uhle grew up in an outlandish home filled with raucous love and humor, punctuated all too frequently by her mother and father’s unbelievable antics and self-defeating, desperate choices. They bartered for dental surgery and drove a Lincoln Town Car to the food bank. When they were nearly ruined financially, the family abandoned their repossessed mansion for humble parish housing and her dad became a preacher. Throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, Uhle, her little brother and their parents seesawed wildly between being filthy rich and dirt poor, devious and virtuous, fake and real.
Over forty turbulent years, their ten different houses and apartments were also full of something else—lots and lots of stuff. Between her mother’s hoarding and her father’s penchant for maximalism, every corner and countertop became piled with unopened boxes of mail-order fabric, never-to-beworn clothing, and mounds of expired food that slowly morphed into shades of pink and green. All of their ever-increasing possessions were purchased with their usually overdrawn accounts. Uhle longed to destroy it all.
Instead, she finds a way to care for them despite their endless exploits and to orchestrate her own escape into hard-won independence.
In “poignant, wryly funny, and exquisitely written” (Erika Krouse) prose, Uhle translates the exuberant and perplexing chaos of her childhood into a page-turning account of the joy, pain, and boundless love that exists between parents and children.
Destined to become a classic in the daughter-memoir genre, Destroy This House offers a tour of one couple's decaying, overdrawn world and the effect it had on their child, a devoted good-girl who did her best to help even as doing so began to compromise her own sanity. The author—a Gen-Xer whose indomitable spirit will be as familiar to readers as her cassette mixtapes—artfully excavates both her n'er-do-well parents' decaying home and her own furious compassion.
—Ada Calhoun, NYT bestselling author of Also a Poet
A fantastically entertaining tale of two of the most endearing grifters ever committed to print—who happen to be the author’s parents.
—Isaac Fitzgerald, NYT bestselling author of Dirtbag, Massachusetts
What do you get when parents’ pursuit of happiness collides with a child’s need for stability? Astounding anecdotes, expired canned goods and hard-won insights on loyalty and love.
—Sarah Vowell, author of Lafayette in the Somewhat United States
The American Dream turns pathological in Amanda Uhle's beautiful memoir, Destroy This House, as Uhle reckons with her parents' snarled identities and confounding lifestyles. Poignant, wryly funny, and exquisitely written, Uhle masterfully depicts the confluence of ambition and greed, pioneerism and narcissism, love and pain. I devoured every sentence.
—Erika Krouse, author of Tell Me Everything
An iconic, only-in-America fable of desperate Midwestern dreamers.
—Dave Eggers
Amanda Uhle’s extraordinary memoir does what so few do, combining absolutely jaw-dropping material with the writerly skill to make it sing. I wanted to reread it immediately. It is a stunning debut you will recommend to everyone you know.
—Jennifer Traig, author of Devil in the Details: Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood
Confessional, vulnerable, honest, and scintillating. I loved every word.
—Hannah Pittard, author of If You Love It, Let It Kill You
In her vivid and bracing debut, journalist Amanda Uhle turns her investigative skills inward, peeling back the layers of deception that shaped her childhood. Blending sharp inquiry with personal insight, she confronts the half-truths of her past, unraveling the tangled web of her parents’ grifts. Destroy This House is a wonderfully evocative exploration of family secrets and the ways they shaped this writer’s life.
—Adrienne Brodeur, bestselling author of Wild Game: My Mother, Her Love, and Me and Little Monsters
With a scheming father and a hoarding mom, both of whom are not so much liars but oblivious to the truth, the childhood of Amanda Long had to be mostly exhausting but a little bit exciting. Dad might be selling books or peanuts or multi-level marketing tapes or a valve that facilitated better soft serve ice cream flow. Mom might be storing up fancy furniture or fabrics or groceries, sometimes long past expiration dates. Sometimes with maggots. Lots of family memoirs are set in the world of poverty or excess, but Destroy This House has both, sometimes at the same time, such as when they divided their weekly meals between the working-class buffet and a weekly country club feast. I love that Milwaukee is the place, however short-lived, where Amanda finds a moment of freedom. The stories of Destroy This House are riveting, but the telling takes it to another level – an observational style mixed with frustration, concern, and despite it all, love.
—Daniel Goldin, Boswell Book Company, Milwaukee, WI