Inspiration behind Why Stuff Matters

Guest Post by Jen Waldo

My second novel, Why Stuff Matters, is about a young widow who, after inheriting an antique mall, must deal with the petty antics and rebellions of the shifty elderly vendors who rent booths in her building.

This novel had two inspirations—one is the setting, based on an antique mall just north of I-10 in Houston; and the other inspiration is the dealers, who charge ten times what their old stuff is worth.

The antique mall in Houston is one of my favorite browsing places, full of tarnished spittoons, bedpans, lacy shawls that have gone yellow, and a whole lot of other stuff that absolutely nobody needs. It smells of mildew and there’s a layer of dust over everything. The lighting is poor and the prevailing color is gray. Caprock Antiques, the mall in the book, so closely reflects this location in Houston that I’ve received emails from readers telling me that they recognized it from their own excursions into the cavernous building.

And the overpricing by the vendors was inspired by a time when I went with a group of church ladies to help at a resale charity shop. Our job was to hang the clothes and place the items attractively on the shelves. The task given to the pair of ancient wheelchair-bound women in the back was to put price tags on the items; and they were pricing them way too high. Eight dollars for a ten-year-old stretched-out pair of sweatpants. Ten dollars for cracked mirror in a wooden frame. One of them put a five-dollar tag on a molded plastic bowl that I’d seen for a dollar at the dollar store. So it occurred to me that these ancient women were identifying with the items. The stuff was old, worn out, and useless, and this is the way the women felt. People over-identifying with material items is the inescapable theme of the book.

While certain writers, most obviously Anne Tyler and Richard Russo, have influenced my method of juxtaposing comedy and tragedy, the peripheral characters in Why Stuff Matters are loosely inspired by the quirky citizens of Stars Hollow in “Gilmore Girls.” Their eccentricities and compassion; the foolishness of schemers and self-servers, and the surly impatience—all are found in Why Stuff Matters. In “GG,” the busybody shopkeeper, the humorless mechanic, the irritable owner of the diner, and the salacious dance teacher are the lighthearted chorus behind Lorelei and Rory’s operatic drama; and it’s to serve this purpose that I created the vendors.

In Why Stuff Matters the issue of stubbornly never letting go and over-pricing items might be exaggerated, but it perfectly reflects how some people value inanimate objects more than they value other humans. The characters filch items from the booths of the recently deceased. One of the vendors bought an entire exhibition of embalmed freakish peculiarities (hairy tumors, seven rats sharing the same tail, a pig with a leg growing out of its back) and paid a monthly fee to store them indefinitely. At one point, the vendors participate in a vicious war over a collection of antique typewriters.

This ode to materialism prods readers to give thought to why we want the things we want and what lengths we’re willing to go to in order to keep what we have.

Why Stuff Matters is a partner book to my first published novel, Old Buildings in North Texas. The reason for this designation is that they are clearly located in the same town, Caprock, and they share a similar writing style—first person, present tense. Both depict a young woman working her way through a painful emotional period, one dealing with addiction, the other with grief. If you like one, you’ll like the other.