The most recommended books about homelessness

Can’t Get There from Here is another stark look at the realities of kids living on the street. Strasser quickly drew me into the life of Maybe and her tribe of friends Maggot, 2Moro, Rainbow, and Tears. Their day-to-day existence is one of scrounging for food, looking for a safe place to sleep for the night, and avoiding those who would harm them. Adults have hurt these kids so many times and in so many ways that their reluctance to trust the police for help is totally understandable.

Ron Hall’s #1 New York Times bestselling book, Same Kind of Different as Me, was the first book I read about homelessness, and I credit it with opening my eyes to this crisis. His uplifting story about his wife’s and his efforts to help the homeless in their neighborhood was also made into a film. Ron’s story focuses on one of the many homeless people he helped, a man named Denver Moore, who went on to live with Ron after Ron’s wife died. Denver also co-authored several of Ron’s books. My book is also co-authored with one of the homeless people I met, a woman named Maggie Wright. Our books are the only ones I know of that include the direct voice of a homeless person, and I feel this adds a necessary depth to a story about homelessness.

I met the poet Nick Flynn over twenty years ago, not long before the publication of his most famous book, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, a memoir about his father’s homelessness. Since then, he has become one of my favorite writers. The Reenactments—for my money, his best book—takes us through the surreal experience of Another Bullshit Night being turned into a film. Robert De Niro plays his father and Julianne Moore plays his mother. De Niro meets Flynn’s father, studying him for character traits. In the most heartbreaking sections, Flynn relives his mother’s suicide as it’s filmed. As Flynn writes: “How often are you offered the chance for a complete reenactment of the day of the disaster?”

Learning to Breathe tells such an important side of the #MeToo Movement, with sixteen-year-old Indira (Indy), a Black Bahamian girl who struggles to find her place in the aftermath of an assault that leads to an unwanted pregnancy. Set in the Bahamas, a place so often portrayed in Western culture as idyllic, it depicts a very different gritty and authentic lived reality for the main character. This heart-rending, yet empowering novel is enlightening on so many levels. Not only does it offer the unique and all-too-often overlooked point of view of a young person of color, but it also deals with complex family issues, homelessness, and a young woman’s path to claiming power over her own body and future. 

This is an engrossing, powerful study of people who were living on the streets in Austin, Texas in the mid-1980s.

It is based on over 100 hours of interviews with tens of such people, but zeroes in on about 20 of them. Their stories are heart-wrenching and moving and really build sympathy for their situations. But it also demonstrates the resilience and courage they display.

It taught me a great deal about why these people really want to work and try to work, but about all the obstacles in their way.

The book gives insight into the beginnings of so many problem issues that face America today. Specifically, it discusses men without work, the male loneliness epidemic, joblessness, homelessness, depression, addiction, and suicide.

This book can help a reader understand why Trump won in 2016. Additionally, it can explain why he is still popular and may win again in 2024.

Bourgois’ and Schonberg’s accounts opened up the ‘parallel world’ of homelessness for me and inspired me to do my own research on homelessness.

They spent years trying to understand people experiencing homelessness in San Francisco, following them on their daily journeys through institutions and city landscapes; they intimately understood their struggles, from mental health and addiction to systematic exclusion.

Their long, in-depth, and grassroots accounts of people on the street made me grasp their varied experiences for the first time.

Girl in Pieces is such an important story for anyone who has gone through any addiction or trauma of any kind before.

Charlotte, the protagonist, is in pieces. At seventeen she’s lost more than most people lose in a lifetime and she’s learned how to forget her trauma in order to protect herself. This is a book about Charlotte surviving in a world that has taken so much, and the journey she undergoes to put herself back together.

Although this book tells a story of people being cruel to themselves, it is ultimately a book about learning how to be gentle with yourself.

Liz Murray’s riveting memoir tells of her unlikely rise from homelessness to being accepted to Harvard. It is another classic triumph over adversity story of someone beating the odds. I picked this book because of my own personal experience with homelessness. During the pandemic, my husband and I walked the deserted New York City streets helping to feed the homeless in our neighborhood. This led to the writing of my third book. Like Westover’s story, my book also tells the story of one woman’s rise from living on the streets of New York City to becoming sheltered, employed, and admitted to college. 

Catherine Ryan Hyde does a masterful job of showing us the stark reality of teen homelessness through the eyes of Jordy and Chloe. The content of the first few chapters was hard for me to read because of what young people must do to survive on the street and what traumas lead them there in the first place. As the story unfolded, though, Hyde took me on a warm and loving journey as Jordy set out to show Chloe that there truly is a lot of beauty in the world.