Travels with Lizbeth
Three Years on the Road and on the Streets
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4.3 • 6 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, Travels with Lizbeth: Three Years on the Road and on the Streets is Lars Eighner’s account of his descent into homelessness and his adventures on the streets that has moved, charmed, and amused generations of readers.
Selected by the New York Times as one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years
“When I began writing this account I was living under a shower curtain in a stand of bamboo in a public park. I did not undertake to write about homelessness, but wrote what I knew, as an artist paints a still life, not because he is especially fond of fruit, but because the subject is readily at hand.”
Containing the widely anthologized essay “On Dumpster Diving,” Travels with Lizbeth is a beautifully written account of one man’s experience of homelessness, a story of physical survival, and the triumph of the artistic spirit in the face of enormous adversity. In his unique voice—dry, disciplined, poignant, comic—Eighner celebrates the companionship of his dog, Lizbeth, and recounts their ongoing struggle to survive on the streets of Austin, Texas, and hitchhiking along the highways to Southern California and back.
“Lars Eighner is the Thoreau of the Dumpsters. Comparisons to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Hamsun’s Hunger leap to mind. A classic of down-and-out literature.”—Phillip Lopate, author of Bachelorhood: Tales of the Metropolis
“Eighner’s memoir contains the finest first-person writing we have about the experience of being homeless in America. Yet it’s not a dirge or a Bukowski-like scratching of the groin but an offbeat and plaintive hymn to life. It’s the sort of book that releases the emergency brake on your soul…A literate and exceedingly humane document.”—The New York Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A man and his dog survive in most precarious circumstances and with something close to aplomb in this classic memoir of homelessness, reissued for its 20th anniversary. Eighner (B.M.O.C.) spent the tail end of the 1980s living on the streets of Austin, Tex., with several epic hitchhiking excursions to Los Angeles and back in pursuit of dubious writing gigs, with his dog Lizbeth as his one steady companion. It's a ground-level view of American life, built around the semiprofessional harvesting of Dumpsters for food and other necessities; scorched-earth warfare against fire ants; Kafka-esque run-ins with welfare agencies, hospital staff, cops, and dog catchers; the perpetual search for an unexposed place to sleep; the kindnesses of strangers; and the grinding boredom of having nothing to do but continuing to exist. The author tells this fraught picaresque with unsentimental clarity and deadpan humor, and the book includes vivid, Twainian sketches of a wandering demimonde of gay drifters and crazed drivers. Eighner's material possessions dwindle, but the detritus that remains dogfood, cigarettes, a sheltering shower curtain adds resonance as a substrate of pleasure, companionship, and meaning. This most threadbare of lives makes for rich, entertaining reading.
