Consumer Camp

 “American Bulk – Essays on Excess” by Emily Mester, 2025

This young author has written what amounts to a consumerist memoir about her family’s desire to buy or hold onto everything in sight.  Mester describes weekly family trips to a Chicago-area Costco to ‘buy in bulk.’ It was their ‘church.’  She goes on at length about her love of Olive Garden and malls.  She details her life at a fat camp, her first job at an Ulta cosmetic store and her sojourn at an upscale private boarding high school in New Hampshire.  She gets panic attacks about ‘something’ during her graduate studies at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and goes to a shrink.  She wrote consumer product reviews, both raging and not, and entered contests for free stuff, both for years. 

As a child Mester was an extremely picky eater, a stage she calls neophobic.  She seems to still love junk food and the comfort food she ate as a youngster, and is kind of a food obsessive. She orders vast quantities of stuff from Amazon, has become an expert at returns, lives by Wirecutter recommendations and lists shopping as her main hobby.

It’s not pretty.   

In the rest of her family, her wealthy Republican father uncontrollably buys every practical thing he can imagine, including big ticket items and things he already owns - to the point of building multiple storage sheds on his property to hold it all.  Her lovable Tea-Party / Trumpy grandmother in Storm Lake, Iowa is a severe hoarder.  Mester is afraid to enter her junked-up home after she peeks through the windows.  It is all kind of depressing in the end, though it starts out funny. It is not. 

As the key recommendation at the Writer’s Workshop goes, ‘write what you know’ and Mester does, name checking every desire, brand, chain and product she remembers.  She’s like a pop-culture Tom Wolfe, but without the deeper social satire. Her family became wealthy enough to buy anything they wanted and she, like her lawyer father, was caught up in the pathology of middle-brow consumerism. Or ‘too much stuff.’  This, incidentally, is a problem many have and why the book resonates with others.  Capitalism’s skill is encouraging consumption. 

To most people, this is memoir about dysfunction, though dressed in the clothing of normality and humor.  To me, who dislikes shopping unless it involves books or records, it is a description of affluenza.  Her ‘hip’ bluntness about her consumer desires and opinions, with her nose ring and lesbianism, might appeal to some young people.  As a result I don’t think this book is as ‘anti-consumerist’ as it is made out to be.  I actually don’t know how it got on May Day’s shelves, but I guess it is a warning description of some kind of sickness.  Beware of retail therapy!  Don’t save every damn jar! Too much stuff!

Mester does make the point that the version of ‘recycling’ the U.S. has is just an invitation to buy more products guilt-free.  She ponders – for a second - whether doing anything as an individual to help the environment matters.  Nah. She has a remarkably thin understanding of capital except its product side, though she does mention how Agriculture Secretary Butz denigrated smaller farmers in the 1970s. 

Mester pokes around trying to understand the cause of hoarding junk and settles on some version of ‘putting things off”’ - procrastination.  She can’t quite analyze why some people buy and others are careful about buying – the latter includes her mother – but Mester hints that it might be related to her own messiness.  She does not attribute it to class background or foreground.  She dwells on Virginia Wolf’s disparagement of middle-brow taste.  She thinks Morgan Spurlock’s “Supersize Me” was an attack on fat people, who were supposedly the real bogey of the documentary.  As Mester remarks about her chatty time at Ulta spewing customer-friendly bromides, she’s good at selling.  And certainly, someone is buying this book because so many buy so much.

Should you buy it?  Well…

As a postscript:  What is a 20-early 30 something doing writing a memoir?  It reeks of me, me, me and I, I, I.  Is she a stand-in for a self-involved generation or ‘The American Way’ or the Iowa Writer’s Workshop way?  I do not think so, except the latter. After all, who gives a shit if you like Goldfish crackers or Diet Dr. Pepper? Or that you lost 25 pounds at fat camp?  A memoir like this secretly reflects a certain upper-class attitude prevalent in the U.S. and abroad, even putting aside its contents.

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “recycling,” “shopping,” “Amazon,” “retail therapy,” “affluenza” “Tom Wolf.”

And I got it at May Day Books!

The Cultural Marxist / July 17, 2025