![]() Sharing Kelleher’s taste is not a prerequisite for reading her book. ![]() ![]() Instead she suggests a third way of wanting: one that involves both understanding our desires and taking pleasure in the sensation of desiring. ![]() For her, the point of thinking deeply about materialism is not to deny ourselves the things we might yearn for, or to live in a state of constant self-judgment. The book manages to celebrate the enjoyable objects in our lives even as it parses their dark side: At one point, Kelleher movingly recalls realizing that the prospect that she “might see or hold something beautiful” gets her out of bed in the morning during bad bouts of the depression she has lived with for many years. Still, Kelleher smartly opts to explore the impulse to buy rather than moralizing about it. “I’ve never found an object,” she writes, “that was untouched by the depravity of human greed or unblemished by the chemical undoings of time.” In her debut book, The Ugly History of Beautiful Things, she seeks to understand both her collector’s impulse and her longing “for more, always more, even when I know I already have enough.” A magpie’s nest of research and anecdotes about the objects that attract her, the book examines the tension she feels between wanting the things she wants-clothes, cosmetics, home goods-and acknowledging the murkier story of how some of those items were made and marketed. The writer Katy Kelleher is seemingly no different. I remember a great outfit, and what I did in it, for a long time. I’m also not going to quit my search for the perfect pair of jeans. I would never give up my copies of my grandmother’s cookbooks. Objects are more than just the sum of their parts. But the relationships we have with our things tend to be more complicated than either of those extremes allow. Mass consumption is everywhere-endless online shopping always a new iPhone or device-as is the reactionary minimalist ethos that demands that we declutter our lives. It can seem, these days, like we are meant to be constantly acquiring things while also constantly getting rid of them.
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