Amanda Uhle Untangles Family Knots in ‘Destroy This House’

Amanda Uhle always knew her family was stranger than most. Her father frequently dreamed up schemes while accruing debt, and her mother hoarded food, fabric and more. Uhle, the executive director of McSweeney’s, dives into the many moves (10 houses in five states) and wrong choices that shaped her childhood in her debut memoir, Destroy This House. But rather than revenge, she seeks clarity and understanding.

Uhle combed through newspapers, family photos, letters, emails and more to piece together a complete portrait of her mother and father. MilMag spoke to Uhle about her writing process and the role Milwaukee played in her story ahead of her talk at Boswell Book Co. on Sept. 5.

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When did you know you wanted to write a memoir about your parents, and when did you start?

I think that some projects, including this one, take a long gestation period. I was thinking about this memoir in 2007; I didn’t really start writing it until 2021, which at that point, there were lots of factors that made [it] happen.

The pandemic had changed my schedule of leaving the house and doing more social things. I had a little more time on my hands than I ever had before. And the book is a portrait of my parents, who passed away in 2013 and 2015, and by that point, I finally felt like I had the distance. I don’t know if I had the wisdom, but I had the space to write the book I wanted to write about them. It wasn’t right to do it during their lives because the story wasn’t over. And right after they passed, the story still wasn’t over. But in 2021, it was the right moment to do something I had thought about for a very long time. I say I started thinking about it in ’07 because it was suggested to me then, and that’s true. But really, my whole life, I knew that my parents were kind of unusual, extraordinary people.

You described in the book that, while writing it, you were trying to piece together what was fact and fiction – using secondary sources and whatever you could find to back things up. What was that process like?

It was so fun and satisfying for me. The house I grew up in was – I would say it was filled with exaggeration. You could sometimes say lies, deceptions – there was some of that that was on purpose. There was a lot more just storytelling, and kind of truth-stretching. In an environment like that, especially after some time goes by, you start to wonder what happened in my childhood. Was this thing that I remember real, or was that a tall tale that I heard at home? I had a desire to pin that down.

Also, I have read a lot of memoirs in my life, and have enjoyed so many of them, but the trap that I wanted to avoid, just desperately, was the complain-y memoir – the kind of memoir that just puts people, especially people who are long gone, up for critique. Only pointing out their flaws. I thought that I don’t want a fully biased look at just the difficulties that I experienced with my parents. There were plenty of difficulties, but I wanted to, as close as possible, tell the truth and tell the facts about what happened in our lives. I thought that the truth would be stranger than fiction, and hopefully readers agree.

I’m happy that you mentioned that because I wanted to ask you about how you decided the tone of this memoir. Some memoirs can feel almost vindictive, and this one doesn’t come off like that.

That’s good. I didn’t want it to be vindictive. There’s no point. My parents are gone, right? I got through it. Whatever happened, whatever weird stuff they did, and we did together, it made me who I am. I like who I am as an adult. So what’s the point of making accusations or complaints?

Even in the house when I was growing up, there was always humor. We were a very jokey, funny house. We laughed all the time. My dad was really funny, and so the time I spent as a kid and with my parents, for the most part, was not a time filled with strife. We did go through some really intense challenges, but I guess I wanted to convey that sense of fun, and the sense that even in bizarre circumstances, that can be fun, and you can still have what my family had, which was a lot of love.

Was there anything when revisiting those memories that surprised you?

What surprised me, in a big picture way, is that I thought some of what I remembered must be fake, right? I expected to find like things that just were in my head, but I couldn’t pin down. There’s this whole thing about my father being part of inventing the Flurry, which later became a McDonald’s ice cream treat, right? I thought, “Well, he was probably bragging, and he was probably tangentially, if at all, involved in that.” And then I found some news articles that pointed to the fact that, yeah, he was involved in that in the early days. He did not participate financially in that situation, but there were lots of things where I thought, “Oh, well, that can’t be true.” And it was extremely fun to realize that all that weird stuff was real.

Did it change in any way how you thought about your parents?

No. My approach to who they are changed throughout my childhood. When I was a very small kid – this is like all families, I think – the parents are kind of heroic. They can do no wrong. That was my mindset until I was 8 or 9, and I started to pick up on some of the pathology that was at play in our house. I grew less and less satisfied with some of the choices they were making, so I had more of a negative opinion of them for a while.

Even though I left them through my teens and 20s and such, that distance was so helpful. It’s much easier to look at family members who are making self-destructive choices – being mad cap and strange and funny – with fondness when you’re not the one responsible for cleaning up after their choices. In this new era of them being gone, it’s easier to look at them that way.

Milwaukee plays a part in your story.

I still call it my favorite city. I work for the most part in San Francisco, which is another fine city in the world, but Milwaukee kind of tops them all in my heart because I just had such a beautiful experience living there. I lived in great apartments. I had great friends. I had a wonderful job. I worked at Alverno College in their performing arts program. I would love to write more about my years there because they were so important to me. But that was not the case for this book. This book needed to focus on the story of my parents. It’s an important but minor part in this story, but a big part of mine.

Anything you’re looking forward to seeing again?

Primarily the bookstore [Boswell Books], which I knew as Harry W. Schwartz at the time. In my Prospect Avenue apartment, one window was to the lake, and the other looked south, and I watched the art museum – the Calatrava expansion – be built. And so I have a lot of good memories of that. Beans & Barley, At Random, Von Trier – I’m ready for the full Wisconsin experience on Friday.

Amanda Uhle discusses Destroy This Home at Boswell Book Co. on Friday, Sept. 5 at 6:30pm. The event is free but registration is required.