Includes bibliographical references (pages 227-234) and index.

Introduction -- The entries -- My life with things -- Learn to love stuff -- Banky -- A digression on the topic of the transitional object -- Cebebrate -- My purple shoes -- Newspapers -- Rose nails -- The window shade -- Napkins -- My white man's tooth -- Should i be straighter -- Cyberfucked -- Knobs -- Glasses -- Curing rug lust -- Window shopping online -- Catalogs -- Other people's labor -- Making roots/making routes -- My closet(s) -- Joining the MRE -- Fun shopping -- Preschool birthday parties -- Xena warrior consumer princess -- I love your nail polish -- Little benches -- The kiss -- Are there malls in Haiti? -- Baby number two turned me into economic man -- Pictures of the rice grain -- Panting in ikea -- Capitalism makes me sick -- My grandmother?s rings -- Anorectic energy -- Mi-mi?s piano -- Dream-filled prescription -- The turquoise arrowhead -- Turning the tables -- Minnie Mouse earring holder -- Make yourself a beloved person -- Writing as practice and process -- This never happened.

Unconventional and provocative, 'My Life with Things' is Elizabeth Chin's meditation on her relationship with consumer goods and a critical statement on the politics and method of anthropology. She centres the book on diary entries that focus on everyday items - kitchen cabinet knobs, shoes, a piano - and uses them to intimately examine the ways consumption resonates with personal and social meaning: from writing love haikus about her favourite nail polish and discussing the racial implications of her tooth cap, to revealing how she used shopping to cope with a miscarriage and contemplating how her young daughter came to think that she needed Lunesta.