American Bulk: Essays on Excess by Emily Mester
In Emily Mester’s childhood home, the dining table was cleared for dining only on Christmas and Easter. Every other day was for piles: piles from shopping bags from shopping hauls from Chicagoland big box stores, but especially from the closest place Emily’s family had to church: Costco.
As a kid, she and her grandma bonded over their love for samples and freebies—a love that Mester later connects to her grandma’s hoarding disorder, her dad’s passion for deals, and her own struggles with excess. With wit and hard-earned insight, Mester’s life stories become a rich text for understanding American consumer culture. She unravels a lifelong obsession with online product reviews, wins a lifetime supply of LaCroix, and muses about her complicated relationship with Olive Garden. At the heart of this memoir-in-essays is her grandma, a proud former teacher whose inability to let things go meant losing the biggest thing of all: her home.
Mester’s struggle with excess doesn’t extend to her writing: American Bulk is a tightly-written balance of humor and humanity.
Reviewed by Emma Radosevich, collection development librarian, Whatcom County Library System
(Originally published in Bellingham Alive November/December 2025 issue.)