Her American dream was only an illusion

The subtitle promises a strong piece of firsthand testimony about the ever-worsening housing crisis. And indeed, in the brief epilogue to her personal story, Michelle Kennedy sets out the shameful and alarming facts for those who may still prefer to kid themselves that homelessness afflicts only hard-core alcoholics and drug addicts. Nearly a million children are presumed to be without homes: “Families are now the fastest growing segment of the homeless population.... Homeless mothers have an average family income of under $8,000, living at 63% of the federal poverty level for a family of three.”

But as one reads Kennedy’s refreshingly candid account of sleeping in a beat-up old Subaru with her three young children, it turns out to be less an expose of the housing crisis (though obviously, that’s part of it) than a story of self-help, rather along the lines of a 12-step group. “Without a Net” shows how frighteningly easy it can be for an ordinary, nonsubstance-abusing, middle-class woman and devoted mother to find herself unable to afford a place to live. Yet Kennedy’s memoir is also a dispiriting snapshot of cultural malaise: of a pervasive emotional and intellectual shallowness.

A middle-class girl from Vermont, Kennedy dreamed of becoming president. She enrolled at American University in Washington, D.C., and interned as a Senate page. Still in college, she married her high school sweetheart. They moved into a comfortable apartment in the Washington suburbs and started a family.

There were just two big problems that Kennedy couldn’t seem to overcome. One was boredom. The other, related to that, was her horror of being merely “ordinary” and her cherished belief that she was “special”: “American University was, and I imagine still is, a place where professionals are made. Somewhere in my head, I guess I thought I had already done the Washington thing, and I was ready to move on to my next adventure -- pregnancy. I quit school at the end of my freshman year.... We also decided that it would be stupid to try and get pregnant, but that we wouldn’t continue to exercise birth control

So at 19, “the once future President of the United States” finds herself married and pregnant. Worse yet, she simply cannot accept that she isn’t “special”: “Being a mother by choice at nineteen was extraordinary to me, but when that mother turns twenty-one or twenty-three, she becomes less interesting and more, well, normal.” A life that might suit a normal person clearly would be boring for someone who is special.

Her husband, naturally, is also “special.” Tom’s problem is that he’s read “Walden” and has been influenced by that vast, vague, nebulous notion that civilization is a plague, and the solution is to drag one’s family up to a one-room cabin in northern Maine, sans heat, electricity and running water. After a year up there, coping heroically with three young children, Kennedy finally decides to pack up and leave after one of the kids is badly injured during a moment of her husband’s inattentiveness. She and the little ones head for the Maine coastline, where she finds a nice job at a congenial bar-restaurant in a pleasant small town. The trouble is, she can’t find an affordable apartment, even in a town this small. She carefully sets aside money from her wages and tips, but it’s still not enough to put a roof over her head.

Kennedy’s account of her ordeal is vivid and believable. As she herself realizes, she was lucky enough to be homeless in a relatively salubrious small town, where she was able to find work and make friends (and where it probably also didn’t hurt that she was white). If her particular story may not seem typical, that is precisely why it’s so pertinent, helping us see the homeless not as some amorphous mass of huddled bodies but as individuals from many different backgrounds, with many different stories. Kennedy’s story of her journey from foolishness to responsibility, edifying though it may be, skirts the issue of the larger socioeconomic conditions that made her so vulnerable: low wages, high rents and astronomically high housing prices -- exactly the kind of systemic problems that far too many “ordinary-special,” uncritical-minded Americans seldom bother to consider. *

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From Without a Net

Ms. Vande Hei smoothes her pleated skirt, looks at me, and says, “I’m sorry, but you don’t qualify for assistance.”

“You’re kidding me,” I say.

“No. I don’t kid. According to the computer, you and your children should be fine on the income you currently provide,” she says. “If you like, I can set you up with a financial counselor, and she can help you budget your money better.”

Fighting back tears, I meekly reply, “Unless she has a lead on a house, she can’t help me.”