Emily Mester

Raised with hoarding and compulsive shopping, Emily Mester is caught in between. What happens when consumption begins to consume you back?

In a series of deeply personal essays, Mester explores how the things we buy, eat, amass, and discard become an intimate part of our lives. We guiltily watch Amazon boxes pile up on the porch, wade through endless reviews to find the perfect product, and crave the comforting indulgence of a chain restaurant. With humor and sharp intellect, Mester reflects on the joys and anxieties of Costco trips, how a seasonal stint at Ulta Beauty taught her the insidious art of the sale, and what it means to get “mall sad.” In a nuanced examination of diet culture and fatness, Mester recounts her teenage summer at fat camp and the unexpected liberation she finds there. Finally, she ventures to Storm Lake, Iowa, to reckon with her grandmother’s abandoned hoard, excavating the dysfunction that lies at the heart of her family’s obsession with stuff. American Bulk introduces readers to a striking new literary talent from the American heartland, one who dares to ask us to regard consumption not with guilt but with grace and empathy.

Essays on Excess

American Bulk

taylor miles hopkins

The Olive Garden was not quick and dirty, nor cheap and campy. It wasn't lurid, or elegant, or niche. In fact, it was a little bit of everything, and so it wasn't much of anything at all…Other chains were cheap in both cost and and aesthetics, and they held no illusions about themselves. They were in on the joke. Olive Garden, on the other hand, took its mediocrity seriously.

[Virginia] Woolf defined the middlebrows not by how much money they had, but by how proficiently they consumed.

I knew very little about the East Coast besides the fact that my dad loathed it. My mom's whole family was from Boston, and he felt that they, like all East Coasters, were haughty about things that were worse. They insisted that a dry Dunkin' Donuts doughnut hole was better than a hot Krispy Kreme. They shopped at BJs when Costco had the deals. They cooed about rocky capes, reeking harbors, frigid beaches with gritty raw sand. They got misty-eyed about the American Revolution but couldn't locate lowa on a map. They paid great sums to slurp on oyster guts and had never even had a deep-fried Oreos.They thought that Boston was basically New York while Chicago was basically Cleveland. They didn't realize the Great Lakes had waves; they thought civilization bloomed only near the water.

…I understood now that Times Square wasn't the turbo city. It was the turbo suburbs. I was in a turbo mall…

To walk around Costco a childless, unattached person is to experience the fragility of your existence. To perk up at the reasonably priced Angus steaks only to realize they are not sold in quantities fewer than eight…is to realize the promise of decay. Costco is a place for families, or else individuals of family-size needs…It is for ambitious appetites and pathological fears. It is for a scarcity that is anticipated but never realized. 

And if the sweet time was replicable, then so was the gray time and the flat time. How could I have thought this way of life superior? My urban malaise was simply suburban malaise sans pity, and beneath it was a constitutional discontent that I would always return to, no matter where I lived.

The suburbs are a place with no center. The architect Victor Gruen hated them, primarily because they were hostile to ambling. Suburban residents had nowhere to flock, nowhere to gather, just houses and strip malls and roads to take you there and back. They were miles of private property dotted with perfunctory strips of green. 

I was mall sad again. Many people would call this suburban malaise. So commonly is suburbia described as a cultivar of hollow, stulifying sameness that the observation is now almost as ticky-tacky as suburbia itself, and it's hard to believe there was ever a time when suburbia was just a word, like city or town or country. Most people would say that shopping malls are sad for the same reason suburbs are sad. If leisure time is meant to be the opposite of work, then a Saturday spent cruising the mall could never grant reprieve from the isolating, exploitative drudgery of the American workweek because the mall, like the suburbs, has been constructed by these very same forces. 

Sometimes I wanted to cry for her. Sometimes I wanted to claw my DNA out of my arm with my bare hands. In her posts, the grandma of saccharine platitudes nestled side by side with the grandma of paranoid fury, and I saw in neither of them the grandma I knew.

At the time, I had wondered whether tourists thought this was the “real” New York, whether they realized that they had come all this way just to be back in a midwestern mall. But now, I suspected that the tourists who flocked to Times Square were under no illusions to the contrary. They were, in fact, seeking exactly this. They wanted to see the familiar exalted, made holy by the powers declaring it so. Times Square was like going to the Vatican. People flocked there because of the other people who flocked there. I knew Times Square to be considered a grotesque symbol by anyone who considers themselves a person of taste, but standing there, I realized it was grotesque only in the way anything familiar is when magnified, like a knuckle under a microscope, an unremarkable expanse suddenly transformed into a monstrous inflamed network of oil and fur.

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