When Jessie Sholl's parents separated and divorced, she could see both of their houses from her elementary school: her father's freshly painted with a yard full of flowers and her mother's junk filled and crumbling with a rusty car or two parked out front. At 10, she chose to move in with her father and stepmother full-time, but her mother's messiness -- which would balloon into a hoarding problem -- continued to affect her.

Her new book, "Dirty Secret: a Daughter Comes Clean About Her Mother's Compulsive Hoarding," starts with her mother being diagnosed with colon cancer and requesting that Sholl, as an adult, put the house in her name. Rift Gold Sholl leaves New York for Minneapolis to help get her mother's affairs in order and embark upon a major cleaning effort, one of five or six she's done over the years.

Her book is a sleeves-rolled-up look at how she came to better understand her mother, her mother's hoarding and how she's dealt with it. While her mother has since beaten her cancer and takes antidepressants, she continues to struggle with hoarding.

AOL Health: How did your mother's house look at its worst?

Jessie Sholl: At its worst, the kitchen was unusable. The stove was broken, and there were dirty pots, dirty plates, pasta strainers and things like that stacked up on each of the four burners, and it was just coated with grime. There were actually little black bugs flying inside the refrigerator, RIFT Platinum Tupperware containers of every shape and size that were bloated from being in there so long, milk that was literally a year past the expiration date. The freezer was one solid chunk of ice with the frozen things kind of buried within it. The kitchen was the worst. We had to get her a new stove and a new refrigerator because they just weren't working.

She has one of those glass porches, so you can see from the street how high up the clutter on the porch is. You could see bicycles, empty picture frames and giant hulking dressers just shoved in there together. Then you'd open the front door to the house and on each side of the hallway there were just stacks of bags of clothes from her favorite store, Savers. Many of the bags weren't even open yet -- she would just buy them and forget about them. There were a lot of winter clothes, boots. rift gold A lot of my mom's stuff is designed for comfort. She would have electric heating pads, back massagers and lots of identical pairs of shoes. She has a thing about these sneakers that are like a cross between a clog and a sneaker, and she had 20 pairs of the exact same kind.

AOL Health: How does your mom feel about being a hoarder? Is it something she acknowledges?

JS: In terms of being a hoarder, she's a lot more self-aware than most. Many hoarders will not admit they have a problem. My mom's true hoarding didn't start until about 14 years ago, and that was when her long-term boyfriend died. That's what happens a lot with hoarding -- it's set off by some kind of trauma. There will be signs beforehand -- a lot of disorganization and very lackadaisical cleaning and things like that -- but then it's actually set off by a trauma.

Even before her hoarding, her house was always really messy, and she would buy just tons of things that she didn't need. So we would go out to lunch instead of, say, RIFT Platinum her having me over for lunch. After the real hoarding began, I would fly in and clean out her house for a week, things like that. The first time I actually said to her, "You know you're a hoarder, right?" she said, "I do, but I'm only a low-level hoarder." I just kind of laughed because it was like, okay, she even knows the lingo.

AOL Health: How do medical professionals classify hoarding?

JS: Compulsive hoarding right now is classified under obsessive-compulsive disorder, but there's a movement to have hoarding become its own discrete syndrome. Because it's not really OCD. Many people who hoard do have OCD, but most don't.