Where the Sun Don't Shine and the Shadows Don't Play: Growing Up with an Obsessive-Compulsive Hoarder

"As a child growing up in a small Louisiana town, Frances Boudreaux couldn’t understand her mother’s obsession with stuff. She stashed clothes, trash, and even worthless trinkets. It was only years later that Frances discovered the truth about her mother: she was an obsessive-compulsive hoarder.

Brutally honest and emotionally-wrenching, Where the Sun Don’t Shine and the Shadows Don’t Play shares a daughter’s struggle to comprehend her mother’s fall from happy teenager to house-bound adult living in the midst of filth and chaos. Spanning her childhood during the 1950s through her adulthood years, Frances traces the rise of her mother’s obsessive compulsive disorder and speaks candidly about the abuse she suffered at her mother’s hands.

A story rich in emotional complexity, this gripping memoir throws back the curtain on one family’s dark secret, and exposes the truth in all its facets. But even more, it reveals Frances’s determination to find healing and peace despite the scars of the past.

“Ms. Boudreaux allows the reader to experience the full gamut of intense, complex, and contradictory emotions of love, hate, fear, tenderness, caring, revulsion, anger, affection, hope, and despair that she experienced. This is a brilliant and moving book, to be read and never forgotten.”
—Bruce Mansbridge, PhD"