Did you know that books breed? If you put The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo on your bookshelf next to say, The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank by Erma Bombeck, nine months later a small, humorous, self-help memoir on downsizing will pop up and snuggle in between them. In fact, everything in your house has been secretly breeding for years. That’s why you now have three teapots, two sewing machines, and enough white elephants to make Hannibal jealous. Believe me, I know a lot about procreation; I trained as a midwife eons ago, and have—as you may have—personally procreated.

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Offspring, material as well as corporeal, have a tendency to appear out of nowhere, and the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s stuff that you hoarded—pardon me, took meticulous care of—is the inheritance that your children don’t want. Though they wouldn’t mind if you left them the diamond tiara that your great-grandmother the tsarina bequeathed to you for safekeeping, or the canary yellow 1983 mint condition Mercedes Benz that’s lying fallow in the garage along with multiple other possessions. Apart from these, everything else you own needs winnowing before you shuffle off this mortal coil.

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One thing is clear. You’re in trouble. Ever since President Bush told you to go shopping after 9/11, you’ve been a good citizen and supported the economy of the United States. Now your closets are bulging. Your on-site and off-site storage is packed full, and I’m going to be honest with you: this won’t be easy, and it won’t be pretty. But don’t panic. It’s doable, even if the gas company destroys the sewer lines on your entire street and then digs a hole in your driveway big enough to bury a SUV just as you’re trying to get your house ready to put on the market.

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Seriously, you’ve got this. There’s no need to call in your pyromaniac connections to eliminate the problem. I’ve lived through the process and survived. So can you. In Diary of a Reluctant Downsizer, you can learn from experts, as I did, and from my many mistakes and a few successes. Getting rid of excess stuff is possible, even with two grandkiddos "helping" with the process. Though you or I may never find out where those thumb tacks went, which my grandson or (insert the name of your own small grandchild here) may or may not have swallowed.

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Diary of a Reluctant Downsizer is a how-to memoir with humorous vignettes that I would have liked to have had as a guide while I progressed through decluttering, house repairs, finding a real estate agent, staging, selling, and packing up, while simultaneously fixing up the house that we were planning to move into. This was all undertaken with a couple of smallish grandchildren underfoot. Snafus happened.