The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing

Title: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing
Author: Marie Kondo
Series: Magic Cleaning #1
First Published: October 14, 2014
Publisher: Ten Speed Press
Pages: 224
Genre: Non-Fiction, Self-Help
Format: Hardcover
Source: Purchased
Rating:


Synopsis:

Despite constant efforts to declutter your home, do papers still accumulate like snowdrifts and clothes pile up like a tangled mess of noodles?

Japanese cleaning consultant Marie Kondo takes tidying to a whole new level, promising that if you properly simplify and organize your home once, you’ll never have to do it again. Most methods advocate a room-by-room or little-by-little approach, which doom you to pick away at your piles of stuff forever. The KonMari Method, with its revolutionary category-by-category system, leads to lasting results. In fact, none of Kondo’s clients have lapsed (and she still has a three-month waiting list).

With detailed guidance for determining which items in your house “spark joy” (and which don’t), this international bestseller featuring Tokyo’s newest lifestyle phenomenon will help you clear your clutter and enjoy the unique magic of a tidy home—and the calm, motivated mindset it can inspire.

Get the Book: Amazon

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Review

I had never watched Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, but I tell you that show was everywhere in 2019, she is the undisputed queen of the minimalist home movement. While I wasn’t that interested in the show, I was preparing for a big move, so I decided to check the book out to see what all the talk was about.

The two essential pieces of wisdom that Kondo advises readers are such: inspect each of your items and only keep that which sparks joy, and to tidy in one huge swoop to change your life. She provides a step-by-step guide on how to tidy thoroughly and offers advice on how to begin organizing and storing the items that you keep. The cleaning guru shares anecdotal stories about her youth, her experiences with clients, and the ways that she developed her method throughout the book. I’ll get back to the personal stories.

When I first started reading I felt motivated, I was in a big transitional period and had moved back home, my space was limited and cluttered, and everything else was stuffed into a storage unit for at least a year. It was a drain on me financially and mentally, so I decided that it was time to just cut my losses and give away, sell, or throw out as much as I could, which I did over the span of two weeks. So I can attest that on some level, Kondo’s method can be helpful. It made me reconsider why I still owned some things and helped me to feel less guilty about discarding things that I had no real use for.

The keyword here unfortunately is some. As much as I enjoyed some of the advice that she gave about rethinking what I had, there was also quite a bit of content in the book that I found ridiculous. She encourages leaving dishes outside to dry, and at one point she claims that tidying can help you lose weight and give you clearer skin, which I found questionable at best. Large parts of the book reads like a sales pitch, with constant mentions of how foolproof the KonMari method is and how the waitlist for her consulting business is proof of how successful it is, and frankly reading marketing talk is not engaging or interesting.

Some of Kondo’s personal stories also bordered on being neurotic and unhealthy, as she admits to throwing out her family’s belongings, bragging about how many bags of stuff she has thrown out, or claiming that she spends every moment thinking about tidying, ritually organizing, and talking to her possessions. It is clear that she has a public persona she is trying to create and uphold for her business, but there was a lot that just didn’t seem authentic. I don’t unhaul books very often, but I was more than glad to hand this book off to an interested friend pretty much immediately after finishing the book, I didn’t even want it on my shelves.

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