The Art of American Consumerism: American Bulk by Emily Mester, A Review
Trigger Warning: Discussion of hoarding, weight, and weight loss
Published in November 2024, American Bulk: Essays on Excess includes essays on American consumerism. Hinging on different connotations of excess and consumerism, and digging into her personal and familial dynamics, habits, and experiences, Emily Mester covers an impressive amount of ground in American Bulk.
Chapter: Wholesale
I was initially drawn to this book because of its discussion of Costco. In “Wholesale,” Mester discusses her (and her family’s) relationship to the infamous American wholesale warehouse, Costco. Mester’s description of Costco as a familial activity was something that I could greatly relate to — like many children, I grew up regularly visiting Costco. There is something visceral about it, the massive quantities of frozen, packaged goods, the food court hotdogs, sitting in the extra-wide carts, the thick, metal wire leaving concavities on the bottom of my thighs. As a neurodiverse child, Costco was my own kind of hell, its fluorescent, echoing, warehouse making me aware of every atom that exists in my body. Mester is skilled in capturing all of these details with extreme specificity.
Chapter: Live, Laugh, Lose
In the chapter “Live, Laugh, Lose,” Mester addresses the language associated with fatness and socioeconomic status. Focusing on a different connotation, she discusses the excess of consumption through the literal vessel of the body. Mester highlights fatness as a symbol of American greed, pointing out how fatness was once regarded as a personal failing and turned into a national epidemic (American Bulk, p. 69). Detailing her experiences as a young person in a fat camp, she recollects the time that her therapist said that she “eats like a poor person” (American Bulk, p. 59). She rebuts, “...as if eating more french fries than green beans could only be a mark of destitution, or ignorance, and not simply a reasonable response to the taste of a french fry” (American Bulk, pg. 60). This juxtaposed with pertinent “Almond Mom” discourse —wherein Gen Z and millennials recollect their mothers insisting that a handful of almonds was an adequate meal— is especially poignant. We are constantly looking for a reason why someone might allow themselves to slip into fatness. Mester calls this out point-blank. Sometimes you eat French fries because French fries taste good. Sometimes people are fat.
Overall, her experiences in fat camp seem mostly positive, but not without discomfort. The camp, she says, was extremely honest. The overall tone of the chapter captured this uncomfortable honesty impeccably, with all the wobbliness and uncertainty of adolescent self-reflection.
Chapter: Shrink
In this chapter, Mester details her first retail job at the large cosmetic retailer, Ulta. I have been working as a barista since I was a teenager and found Mester’s recollections to be both painstakingly relatable and oddly comforting. She captured the customer service employee experience in a balanced way, describing both the things that fueled her and the things that drained her, with equal fervor.
Something that felt especially relatable to me was Mester’s discussion of the unspecialness that comes with being an employee. Reading Mester’s discussion of the great levels of power that employers hold over employees in terms of censorship and sterilization felt like a revelation. But what took it to the next level for me was her ability to simultaneously address the subtle, soothing nature of the mindless hustle. She remarks, “It felt right, somehow, to complement the customer’s impulses. To confirm them. It felt like the store’s final act of magic, to transform want into need” (American Bulk, p. 125). How many times have I insisted on the necessity of a pastry with a coffee? How many times have I caught myself oohing and aahing about a particular flavor in a latte in an over-exaggerated tone — “It’s sooooooo gooooooood”— or validating someone who insists on having six shots of espresso at five p.m.? My opinion has been commodified. Sometimes I can’t even tell whether I mean it or not.
Toward the end of the chapter, Mester describes the relatable minimum wage let down, “I began to hate how much I hated the job, how I felt ground down by each small indignity, how I felt lowly for not having a sales floor position, how I’d catch myself scrubbing the toilets with too-small rubber gloves and thinking I don’t deserve this, as if there were people who did” (American Bulk, p.132).
Chapter: Stormlake
The “Stormlake” chapter is split into three parts, sat square in the beginning, middle, and end of the collection. By spreading the chapters throughout the book in this sort of picking up and dropping off motion, Mester is able to recreate the sort of jolting experience that she had navigating her relationship with her grandmother, a hoarder.
Mester’s recounting of her grandmother’s life, her childhood perception of her grandmother, and the tumultuous relationship between her grandmother and her father demonstrate intergenerational trauma resulting in unhealthy participation in consumerism.
Her grandmother lived in Stormlake, Iowa, for 36 years. After her husband suddenly passed away, she lived alone in their house for 12 years, which had become completely overrun with items. After she retired, she abandoned her home in Stormlake and moved to Illinois, excited to be unknown.
Mester’s grandmother and her father are both unique, strong characters, delving into their specific judgements, confusing religious and political affiliations, and the ways that they interact with one another and the world. Mester discusses her grandmother’s insatiable love for complementary promotional freebies, as well as her father’s overconsumption that was initially sparked by Costco and later graduated to the online realm with the rise of Amazon.
It is in part two where Mester delves into her father’s childhood as shaped by her grandmother’s unrelenting grasp on money, which often left her father going without items that they should have been able to comfortably afford. There is a reveal included that makes this iron grip on her cash both justified and completely obsolete.
In the later parts, Mester goes to visit Stormlake with her partner to assess the damage of the long-abandoned hoarder house. She hoped to discover it intact and undisturbed, but when she was able to look through the window and witness that undisturbedness, it filled her with something she hadn’t expected — fear.
Mester’s discussion of her grandmother and her abandoned house encases an intense respect and humanization of hoarders that are often perceived as lazy, unthoughtful, or crazy. She states, “Our living naturally creates piles of disorder, and it requires tremendous effort to work against the entropy” (American Bulk, 207), making clear that the line between that pile of unfolded laundry in your room and full-blown hoarding might be thinner than you think it is.
Overall, American Bulk is entirely worth the read. I want to make everybody read it. I want to give it to my roommates, art school friends, and coworkers, but I also want to give it to my Mom. It is a text I would assign, but also something I would discuss with a stranger at a bar. It infiltrates my thoughts as I pass through the sliding doors of TJ Maxx. I think more critically about the way I speak with customers at my day job, and stares back at me when I pass by a reflective surface at the gym. Mester’s unique tone, intense specificity, and close recollection of events make for an extremely smooth reading experience. American Bulk opens a path for readers to reflect critically upon their own forms of overconsumption, spanning a myriad of connotations, and creates space for discussion surrounding consumer culture in America today.
