Joshua Robinson’s Homeless With God offers a look into the surreal and taboo world of homelessness.
Since I review books at a queer magazine, and queer writing is still dominated by memoir, I read a lot of memoirs. The core of most queer memoir is a big ball of pain writers dig through to make sense of their situation. Reading memoir, I’ve decided It’s fun to have an author take us on a journey, but memoirs are most meaningful when that author is by our side, when they tell a story they think they know only to encounter new twists and turns.
This is what gives Joshua Robinson’s Homeless With God its power. It’s a book that can read chaotically but also one that repeatedly runs up against the question: “Why did this happen to me?” or even more basically, “What happened to me?” As Robinson explores their time orbiting LA’s skid row trying to survive homelessness, they also orbit the core of their predicament: “I was 33 years old. I had no savings, no 401K, and I didn’t have a bank account … I was responsible for putting myself here, or my disorder was. Or a combination of bad choices and mental illness had led me to this point.”
Robinson explores how their bipolar 1 disorder (along with systemic factors) repeatedly altered their reality to prevent them from accessing resources, though we also see them in real time explore what allowed them to survive. They bounce between shelters, police stations, psych wards, and hospitals to find a place to sleep and they often need to rely on the kindness of strangers or luck to find meals. In the end, with one phone call, they are able to return to their parents’ house. Robinson write about how simple it was for them, with their resources, to leave their situation, yet how impossible their mental health made it. It comes to an exploration of the factors that lead someone, even with relative resources, into homelessness and what prevents them from escaping.
Something about the way Robinson writes, or the situation they are writing about, allows for a refreshing honesty with regards to their spirituality. Some of my favorite passages in the book were discussions of faith with Satanists, atheists, or the other Christians Robinson meets. But the moments of prayer offer some of the most casually spiritual passages in any book I’ve read recently. One of my favorite is near the end, as they are on the cusp of securing housing in Boulder, Colorado: “’Lord, please give me a place of my own to rest my head.’ Ask for more. ‘And kind roommates.’ Ask for more. ‘A downstairs with a ping pong table, a kitchen, and a television?’ Done.’” The spirituality in the book never proselytizes, it is often quirky or mystic, it is told as one of the facts of the narrative which gives extra heart to the book.
In the afterword, Robinson notes that the book may have inaccuracies, because of the way “Homelessness eats away at your mind and memory.” Sometimes the writing is chaotic, skipping over large details without further description, which can make it hard to get a clear idea of what Robinson’s world looked like. They also contradict themselves, skip around in time, and leave some important things unexplained, especially at the beginning of the book when they are attempting to describe the chaotic circumstances which led to their homelessness. One of the effects of this writing is to create periods of time that feel more like vignettes. The book is roughly chronological, but that chronology is also fractured; most chapters are time stamped by month, but some chapters have time frames like “Still 2018 …”
The order of events in the book is given in the headspace of Robinson at the time of writing. The writing can feel cyclical, orbiting around Skid Row while Robinson tries to make sense of their situation. As they take steps towards accessing resources, they suddenly fall back into mania and find themselves far afield from where they need to be. Reading the book can be displacing; it mirrors the kind of fugue of surviving their homelessness. In the end its difficult to believe, given everything that happens, that the time frame of the memoir is around three months, from March to June 2018. Between their spirituality, the horror of homelessness, and their mental illness, Robinson paints a picture of a world alongside housed life but one that operates in a different reality.
The book offers a subtle call to action and compassion. Robinson, at the time of their homelessness, was already an accomplished writer with a post-secondary degree. They had family to call on, but even with their resources it took them months to get off the streets because of their mental health. The book challenged assumptions about who could fall into homelessness and how the resources available help them to escape their situation. Where the writing is confusing, the heart of the story remains powerful enough to carry the narrative along.
I enjoyed Homeless With God. It’s a book that challenged my assumptions and gave a look into a world that is a taboo topic in most middle-class society. I’m often ambivalent about spirituality in memoirs, especially where authors sacrifice their own subjectivity or themes to the idea of a religion providing meaning. Memoirs are better where an author tries to make sense of their memories, even when they don’t succeed. Robinson’s spirituality and mental health are both explored without sacrificing their own thoughts or choices. It’s exciting to see a book that provides something so unique from a local author.
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