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BOOKS
When Less Is More
How a BC English professor let go of material goods and found freedom in return.
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Earlier this year, Boston College English Professor Suzanne Matson spent two weeks with students hiking the Camino de Santiago in Spain as part of an experiential course on pilgrimages that she leads. Inspired in part by the spare approach of Emma Gatewood, the first woman to complete the Appalachian Trail, Matson brought a daypack that carried only about ten pounds of gear: a single change of clothes, a rain poncho, a notebook, and a few other small items. “It was delightful to have only that,” Matson recalled. “Life felt so simple.”
In the new book Winnowing, Matson, who is codirector of BC’s creative writing concentration, unpacks how she has come to love the feeling of freedom that accompanies a life unencumbered by a surfeit of material possessions. Winnowing is an evocative personal account of how Matson recently purged her home of belongings that she and her family no longer needed or wanted, from old clothes to outgrown toys to extra furnishings. The book is also a philosophical exploration of how and why people develop practical and emotional attachments to objects in the first place. Along the way, Matson incorporates historic anecdotes, such as the story of Gatewood, and research on topics like hoarding.
Early on in Winnowing, Matson describes the state of her home—as well as her state of mind—prior to the laborious process of paring things down. “You could come to my house and not immediately feel that there are too many things,” Matson writes. “But the bedrooms upstairs and the closets, cupboards, drawers, attic, and basement are full. Even when I’m not looking at the stuff, I’m somehow feeling it. I’m convinced that mental energy gets sapped by an excess of things around you.” Page by page and room by room, she experiences a kind of catharsis as she contemplates what to keep and what to discard, and shares what she learns about the value of discernment.
Matson said that helping her late mother cull her possessions as she progressively downsized homes may have had something to do with shaping her attitude toward physical possessions and fostering a creative interest in them. “I think I developed a sensibility of living lightly partly in contrast to how weighed down she seemed by her stuff,” she said. In 2019, The Boston Globe Magazine published an essay Matson wrote about curating her mother’s property ahead of a move to an assisted-living studio. In 2023, Matson wrote a Boston Globe essay about the bittersweet process of selling her childhood Barbie collection on eBay. “Grappling with material legacies is something that I’ve been writing about in various forms and genres for a very long time,” she said. “My second book of poetry is called Durable Goods. In my first novel, The Hunger Moon, one character is a woman who moves from a family home to a condominium and doesn’t unpack her stuff. She lives in an empty white condo and enjoys it that way.”
With Winnowing, her first book of nonfiction, Matson wanted to interweave personal reflections with some cultural anthropology. She cites a study that found one in five Americans rent storage units, with 40 percent of those people reporting it’s because they ran out of room at home. She describes overconsumption as a significant driver of climate change, the dire effects of which ironically wind up destroying property through increasingly devastating storms, fires, and floods. She considers how much easier it has become to accumulate in an “utterly frictionless” online economy that delivers goods from warehouses to doorsteps with the click of a button.
What Matson said she didn’t want to write was a prescriptive manual to voiding one’s home, in the vein of a Marie Kondo book. Whether to keep, discard, or donate something is a personal choice, she said, and neither intrinsically good nor bad. More important to her was being reflective about the reason. When Matson rediscovered a small stuffed tiger she received as a six-year-old, for instance, she writes that she kept it so that she could continue to “inhale the delightful musty scent of childhood.”
“For me, this was about coming to the realization that touching the material things that have come in and out of your life is instructive,” Matson said. “It brings you back to your life in a really interesting way. I liken it to a sport. It’s not a fast process, but it’s an interesting one.” ◽
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