Michelle Kennedy

If you're looking for great literature or even a "good read," you should probably skip this book. The author has very little insight into homelessness, herself, or even (it seems)the reality that she purports to be writing about. It's not just that she made one bad decision after another-- we've all made some howlingly bad choices in life-- but the fact that, even while writing about them for publication, she doesn't seem to understand what her experience means in a greater context. A million American children are homeless on any given night, she informs us . . . in a post-script. She seems blind to anything but her own, mostly inchoate and unthinking, desires.

She throws in a few throwaway lines in the post-script, justifying her bad decisions and her treatment of other people. She assures us that her kids don't even remember her irresponsible treatment of them. I'm sure they wouldn't have remembered much about it if a real tragedy had occurred, either. The children's lack of memories don't justify the neglect.

The funny thing is that Michelle Kennedy is a lot like me. We made similar stupid decisions. We come from similar middle class backgrounds. Like most people with our backgrounds, we both have lived only one paycheck from disaster for years. Maybe that's why her breezy and offhand account of her mindless youth grates on me so badly. It's like I'm seeing my own bad decisions magnified and then, instead of owning up to them, just rationalizing them away. Uck.

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