A wee lil’ time ago, just after Netflix premiered the pure series Tidying Up With Marie Kondo, a war broke out on Twitter. A war against author and consultant, Marie Kondo and her cleaning methods.
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Kondo encourages people to declutter via her KonMari method which advises punters to seek optimal joy when they’re sorting through all their belongings.
Pick up a pair of your shoes. Does it spark joy? Yes? Keep it. If it doesn’t? BYE.
Kondo applies this method to everything from your bits and bobs to your clothing, Christmas decorations, toys, and… books.
In terms of reactions to the latter, Twitter was extremely divided.
Thank you all for your incredible response to my uprising against Konmari The notion that books should spark joy is a LUDICROUS one. I have said it a hundred times: Literature does not exist only to comfort and placate us. It should disturb + perturb us. Life is disturbing.
— Anakana Schofield (@AnakanaSchofiel) January 4, 2019
https://twitter.com/glazebrookgirl/status/1081077930594205697
https://twitter.com/McKelvie/status/1081340395991252992
I cant believe Marie Kondo said to destroy all books and then broke into peoples’ houses individually and made them eat all their books and then when they tried to protest she said “don’t talk with your mouth full of books, bookmouth” and all the cool kids laughed at them.
— Sam Sykes (@SamSykesSwears) January 5, 2019
In classic Kondo fashion, the author recently set the record straight, banishing that hot mess of a Twitter debate to ! the ! bin!
In an interview with IndieWire, through her translator Marie Iida, Kondo broke it down to individual preferences. The author herself only keeps 30 books but the next person might have a hundred and so on and so forth.
“It’s not so much what I personally think about books. The question you should be asking is what do you think about books,” she said.
“If the image of someone getting rid of books or having only a few books makes you angry, that should tell you how passionate you are about books, what’s clearly so important in your life.”
OH, and Kondo most certainly does not recommend burning or throwing away your books… as Twitter may have led you to believe.
“I always recommend donating them, so if that’s part of the misunderstanding, then that’s certainly being mixed up.”
Tidying Up With Marie Kondo is available on Netflix.
You can give her books a suss, HERE.
