Without a Net: Middle Class and Homeless (with Kids) in America: My Story

Kennedy calls herself the “queen of bad judgment,” an assertion that’s hard to contest. She married her high school boyfriend, dropped out of American University, had three babies in quick succession, ran up her credit card debt, then followed her husband to Maine. The husband turned out to be a loser, and when she left him, her station wagon became her temporary home.

The title suggests a book packed with insights about what it means to be middle class and homeless, but Kennedy doesn’t deliver, in part because she writes narrowly about her own experiences. There’s no exploration of the myriad reasons—domestic abuse, drug addiction, a sick child and no health insurance—why educated young people can, and do, end up homeless. And while Kennedy touches briefly on the failure of the social safety net when she describes trying to qualify for Section 8—the federal program that provides housing vouchers to low-income people—she offers no context about the cuts to this program that have exacerbated the nation’s housing crisis.

Kennedy’s perseverance in saving money and finally finding a home for her family is impressive. In the end, though, Without a Net is less a meditation on homelessness than a first-person memoir about the steep cost of bad decisions.