Travels With Lizbeth

by Lars Eighner

A homeless man describes his travels, celebrating the companionship of his dog, Lizbeth, and recounting their ongoing struggle to survive on the streets of Austin, Texas, and along California highways.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Travel, Biography, Animals, Biography Memoir, Sociology

271 pages, Hardcover

First published September 27, 1993

Reviews

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Posted at Shelf Inflicted

Travels With Lizbeth is a candid and thoughtful chronicle of Lars Eighner's three years of homelessness. The author writes very eloquently and with a sense of humor about his friendships, traveling companions, jobs, and hardships. He is a keen observer of people and places and the love he has for his dog, Lizbeth, is heartwarming. Eighner sheds light on the problems that still exist today within the U.S. medical and mental health care systems and debunks common myths about homeless people. He writes without self-pity, yet very humanely about a problem many people would rather forget existed.

A wonderful book!

[Lars · Rating 5 out of 5]

Err...I wrote it.

[William2 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hemingway said in a letter that when prose is magical, as it can be in Travels With Lizbeth, that the reader is never sure how it's done. You can reread it all you want and you will never quite know how that particular sequence of words was able to transcend the sum of its parts. The work thus becomes inimitable. That's the case here. 

So engaging are the travels of Lars Eighner and his dog, Lisbeth, that I developed an anxiety-ridden hyperawareness of the dangers they constantly ran, such as good suspense writing will give you. Author Eighner is aware of it, too, but if anything he understates the risks. I was reminded of certain scenes in Cormac McCarthy's The Road, that post-apocalyptic dystopia. Yet the shopworn devices of suspense fiction are nowhere in evidence. What Eighner and pup went through was real. Then he will come up with some funny observation. For instance, about hitchhiking through Tucson, where he was harrassed by howling, gun-brandishing, drive-by rednecks, he writes: 

I reflected on what our last ride had told me; Tucson--or so he said--was one of the few cities in America that was off limits to Soviet citizens. I supposed for that reason the Soviets had a number of missles aimed at Tucson. I took that as a reassuring thought. Arizona is a desolate wasteland, but it might be considerably improved by detonating a few H-bombs in and around Tucson.

It is this interplay of pathos and humor, that and the beautifully spare prose--also, come to think of it, reminiscent of McCarthy, though without the biblical overtones--that enlivens the narrative. The prose is unadorned yet every page or two the reader is zinged by some bit of archaic vocabulary: eleemosynary, just one example, got a rise out of me. The story is alternately harrowing and tragic, heartrending and hilarious. The chapter "Dumpster Diving" has the thoroughness of an ethnographic study. The chapter describing Eighner's hospitalization for phlebitis reminded me of certain absurdist scenes from the film The Hospital written by Paddy Chayefsky. The crazies he runs into boggle the mind. Fortunately, before this period of homelessness Eighner had a long-time job in a mental health facility. So he is often able to recognize the symptoms and thus the diseases of his unfortunate fellows.The tales of these crazies he give us unadorned, letting the bonker's irrationalism stand for itself. One psychotic chap, Tim, off his medication, stalks Eighner from Austin to LA and back again. Casually Eighner begins to consider how he might kill the man and efficiently dispose of his body. Keep in mind that the author went through this ordeal of homelessness mostly in Austin, Texas, where the river of compassion seems little more than a dry stream bed. His indictment of that state's social service system is absolutely damning. To wit:

It would have been greatly to my advantage if I could have admitted to being an alcoholic or a drug addict. The social workers have no way of assisting someone who is sane and sober. My interview with the social worker made it clear that only three explanations of homelessness could be considered: drug addiction, alcoholism, and psychiatric disorder. [Eighner was none of these.] The more successful I was in ruling out one of these explanations,, the more certain the others would become. Professional people like to believe this. They like to believe that no misfortune could cause them to lose their own privileged places. They like to believe that homelessness is the fault of the homeless--that homeless people have special flaws not common to the human condition, or at least that the homeless have flaws that professional people are immune to.

One of the best things about the story is Lisbeth. An ordinary dog by most measures, she is a love, a protector and companion, a warm bed fellow. When she is seized by a dogcatcher for allegedly biting someone--she didn't--and is put on death row at the Austin pound, well, that was quite the heart-wrenching sequence for this reader. What a tale. It's very emotionally involving. Extraordinarily well written. Insightful and very human. Please read it.

[Jessaka · Rating 3 out of 5]

Adventurous, heartwarming and heartbreaking.

If you wish to understand homelessness, this is one of the books you should read, or if you just like a good adventure, you would find this an interesting read, too, if you can even call it an adventure. Maybe it is just a book on survival, but it is also a dog story, and who doesn’t like a good dog story with a happy ending?

It reminded me somewhat of “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac, but Lars doesn’t steal, do drugs, or drink alcohol, but some of his friends who are not homeless do. As a result he stays out of jail and goes hungry when he can’t find food. He learns to dumpster drive and spends a chapter describing how to do it without getting food poisoning. He even takes extra cans of food to the shelters. I have seen homeless people where I live, share that they have with others. It is very touching and giving.

Lars is not just homeless on the streets, he also hitchhikes to California and then back to Austin a couple of times, just to look for work. On the way, he often found often himself sleeping along side of the road because no one had stopped to give him a ride. The one story that I couldn’t forget was when he was walking into the forest and camped along side of the road, along with his dog. He almost decided to sleep on a cement slab near the bridge that night, but instead slept under a tree. But I won’t say what would have happened if he had slept on the slab. I don’t wish to ruin that story.

Then Lars found it impossible to get help from the government, because he needed proof of who he was, etc. Try keeping an I.D. when you get robbed, as he did a few times. Then at the time he was trying to get food stamps, you needed a kitchen before they would give them to you. Maybe he should have brought them a kitchen skin from some dumpster. Our government can be so Dickensian--low wages, no jobs, and making it hard for those who ask for help, especially those on the streets.

Speaking of which, Lars expels many of the myths that surround homelessness. Not every one is a drug addict, an alcoholic, mentally ill, or lazy. It isn’t easy finding a job once you have become homeless. For examples, you don’t have a phone, perhaps not a car, or a place to bathe.

What else stood out to me in this book is how the homeless are often treated cruelly by others who are faring much better, and how quickly a homeless person can get robbed of what little they own. I remember when I was volunteering to help the homeless, a homeless man talked about wishing he had a lock for his bike because his last one had been stolen. My husband and I bought him a chain and a lock, but the next time we saw him he was without a bike, a chain and a lock. We gave up trying to help him in this way. It was also nice to see that people were really trying to help Lars. Some who wouldn’t give him a ride, at least left food for him and/or his dog.

Speaking of his loyal dog Lizbeth, and by loyal I mean that she stayed with him through thick and thin, as dogs often do, I often felt bad for her, too, as she didn’t always appear to be enjoying the trip. But Lars really loved her and took the best care of her, and sometimes it was heartbreaking because of this, but it all worked out by the end of the story.

Note: While the author of this book was discreet about his sex life in most of this book, the last few chapters were somewhat explicit. I usually don't read books when they have erotica in them, but this book was such a great read with a lot of information in it that pertains to homelessness.

[Ken · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book thanks to a big New York Times feature on the best memoirs of the past 50 years. About a homeless guy and his dog, Lizbeth, it said. Sounds like nothing I've read before, I figured (having never read Steinbeck's Travels with Charley).

So, yeah. If you ever wondered what it's like to be homeless, this will help. Ditto to be poor. Ditto to be an ace at dumpster-diving. Lars, Lars, Lars. He had an obvious disdain for "yuppies," making this sort of dated goods, but you get the idea. The same "type" people are out and about now, just carrying a different name.

One conclusion I can make: Guys with dogs, while still not wildly successful at it, are more likely to succeed at hitchhiking than guys without. Woof! Another star for the canine crew! All the hitchhiking in this book (Texas to Cali and back) will both increase and decrease your faith in the human race. Lots of jerks. Lots of scary people. And a few kind souls---even if they just hand Lars and Lizbeth leftover McDonald's or some money instead of a lift.

So much sameness makes the chapters good and average. Various adventures with various characters are met with varied success by the author. Included in the book is the much-anthologized (or so it says in the afterword) chapter on dumpster diving. A veritable how-to! (I didn't take notes.)

Glad I read it. Glad I finished it. That's the m.o. of 3-star books.

[Nic · Rating 4 out of 5]

A gripping piece of nonfiction. It's interesting (but not unsatisfying) that Eighner never alludes to how he became homeless. I surmise he walked away from a position working in a mental health facility and a social services position working with PWAs. They are high burnout careers, so that's not too shocking, but he seems to associate with a real counterculture contingent (ex-cons, ex-hippies, hardcore alcoholics) without wholly being part of any group. He's a true independent spirit.

I really appreciate the suspense inherent in a tale of on-the-streets survival and find his straightforward narrative voice refreshing. Eighnter walks a successful tightrope between making the reader aware of the politics of being homeless without ever becoming judgmental or preachy. His scenes are vivid, his voice literate, straight-forward and unsentimental. I used to teach his essay "On Dumpster Diving" in Freshman English. It's a treat to now read the whole adventure. By the chapter "Lizbeth on Death Row," I was surprized to discover how much I cared about the two protagonists. Reading this narrative is a deceptively deep experience and one that engenders empathy for people living out of the norm. I highly recommend it.

[Ushan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lars Eighner has "an education in ethnic studies" but did not finish college; in the late 1980s, in his late 30s, he worked at "a state lunatic asylum" in Austin and supplemented his income by writing erotic short stories for gay magazines. He did not have a family but did have a dog he loved as his own child. After a conflict with the hospital management, he resigned under the threat of firing; one year later he was evicted from his apartment, and became homeless. He could not get unemployment insurance because he quit his job on his own; he could not get food stamps because he did not have a kitchen to cook in (what a bizarre requirement!). Eighner remained homeless for about three years, sleeping in public parks, fishing in Dumpsters (finding so much food there that he donated surplus cans to a food bank for AIDS patients), and swimming in a public swimming pool instead of showering. He sometimes had sex with other men for money, though this did not seem to be a major source of his income. In search of a job, he hitchhiked to a friend in Hollywood, writing a script for an adult film, and back, running into various characters, from Good Samaritan Christian fundamentalists to winos and thieves. If Eighner had been alcoholic, addicted to drugs or mentally ill, there would have been institutions ready to help him, but he was neither nor was he willing to lie that he was. Admitted to a public hospital with phlebitis, he had to fight a "Dr. Stalin" who wanted to involuntarily commit him to a psychiatric hospital. At the end of the book, Eighner and his dog settled in an abandoned bar, where he wrote the book on a computer he fished out of a Dumpster.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

“A homeless life has no storyline. It is a pointless circular rambling about the stage that can be brought t happy conclusion only by a dues ex machina,” writes Lars Eighner.

Heartfelt story about three years on the road and streets with the author and his dog Lizbeth. They were both homeless at the time.

“Sometimes, especially when the rains had come and gone through the night many times and I had packed our gear up and led Lizbeth to some slight shelter and the rain had stopped and we had returned to our bedroll only to be woke by renewed rains, sometimes I would think, my mind still fogged by sleep, ‘The hell with this. I am going home,’ as if I were some backyard camper, as f I had only to admit that my expedition was not so much fun as I thought it would be, as if I could give it up, pack my gear, and go inside to my own warm bed. I did not have many nightmares, but this was the cruelest dream.”

[Sean · Rating 4 out of 5]

I remember when this book came out. Picked up a used copy somewhere along the line but never read it. Was curious to see how things have changed in the last 20 years. Not so much. We still hate homeless people. We still think it's their own moral failing. Of course, when we go back to our comfy homes we don't see someone like Lars working. Someone was just telling me about a camp that was just cleared. When one of those living there came back and saw it he asked where he was supposed to go. You can imagine where she told him to go. Surprised Lard didn't spend much time in the public library. Maybe it was because of his view of government workers. But not much has changed, if you don't have a permanent address, we still hate you.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kind of a fascinating but overwritten memoir of Lars Eighner's experience being homeless for three years in the '80s. As he says, all experiences of homelessness are unique and he was not typical, nor is there a typical homeless person, but he does try to do some sociological explorations of the various other homeless people he meets: the single men and their drinking clubs, because drinking is the only activity available to them; a woman he knew when he was an orderly at the state mental institution who he sees again on the streets, a woman who can be helped by medication, but stops taking it as soon as she stabilizes and is released back to the streets; and a man he meets who is, as he calls it, an "institutional parasite," someone who lives in and takes advantage of a public institution as though it were their home. Lars is coincidentally trying to write a novel about a man who lives in a hospital by pretending to be a doctor, when he meets a man who lives at the University of Texas- Austin by passing as a professor. The man is invested in writing poetry for those scam poetry competitions that used to be advertised in the back of magazines. He has worked for the university, he has some keys, so he wanders around in various professors' offices and sleeps on their couches. He believes he is a keeper of the secret knowledge of an ur-university that exists hidden inside the regular university. Amazing stuff.

Lars himself is an interesting guy. This book is so overwritten, I almost gave up on it a couple times. He seems like an odd character: a possibly autistic gay man who survived the plague but whose employment history was marred by work in a collectivist hospice that didn't support “the man” by doing things like providing recommendations to former employees. He lived in a shack with a roommate and a dog, a roommate who was too young to understand that if no one in the household had any money, then you lose the shack. Lars is successfully publishing stories in gay literary magazines, but they don't pay the bills. His plan is to hitchhike to California to stay with a friend who is also staying with a friend, and try to get work in the gay literary magazine industry. Lars' friend is currently incarcerated for soliciting a minor, release date soon but TBD, so Lars stays with the friend of a friend and chases down various employment opportunities that come to nothing. Lars sends so many letters and uses so many public resources to find a job, because it's the '80s and that's how you did. He reminisces about writing to the Encyclopedia Britannica information service about topics he was curious about, because that was how you googled. A friend moves apartments while Lars is elsewhere, and Lars never sees him again. The world without technology. And traffic safety. Lars is hitchhiking the Southwest and putting a little too much trust in too many interesting characters, because that's who is willing to pick up a massive homeless man with a dog. He seems romantically interested in a few of them but nothing works out and they are also crazy, so good thing.

After California, Lars hitchhikes back to Texas, where he begins his life as a person who is truly homeless, without a goal, just survival. He seems more connected to the world than some homeless people. He knows people at the gay bar and they don't mind if he spends most days sitting on a bench outside. He lives in a park at first, along with some other randos who are also more or less discretely living in the park. He does suspect though, that he gets rousted because he brought two guys back from the bar shortly before the police come. Man. In the '60s they invented sex, in the '70s they experimented with it, and in the '80s they almost ruined it entirely. “Hey babies, why don't you both come back to my bedroll in the public park and we'll have some fun.” Everything he says about sex makes it as unpleasant as possible. He'd go to the bathroom in a different public park for hook-ups. Two guerrilla public health educators hung out there and had sex publicly as a demonstration of how to have fun while using condoms. The '80s. Leave the public restrooms alone. Sometimes people just need to pee.

There's an interesting chapter on dumpster diving that Lars wrote while he was homeless, explaining the reliability of various foods. Canned goods from college students- yes. Any kind of leftover- no. Fruit juice- probably not. Pizza before the pizza restaurant started locking their dumpster- hell yes. Also, the many good items that he found. The way that a person will go through a period of hoarding anything in a dumpster that can possibly have any value, and how some people never stop, and end up with dumpster diving hoarding lairs around the city. Lars is robbed repeatedly while he's homeless. He learns to carry a daypack of critical things, including dog food, but his dog is smart and figures out quickly that people will give her treats if she looks like a pitiable waif, even though dog care is his number one priority and his dog spends three years homeless and never misses a meal. There's a terrifying chapter where his dog is accused of biting someone and spends ten days on death row. Lars is able to raise the money to free her, which is an amount that would be fine for most people, but for him, a homeless man, is only possible because of the kindness of people from the gay bar and a newspaper he writes for.

After another failed trip to California, Lars has homelessness locked down and Swiss Family Robinson's himself a hideaway in a stand of bamboo. A man who is crazy, in love with him, and has no discretion, moves into the same bamboo and ruins the whole thing. Lars finds a way to move into the gay bar he used to sit in front of, the bar that has closed down recently, and from there he's able to rebuild his life enough to live somewhere else, and write a book.

It sounds like this is already an important text in the field of sociology. It should be. It's definitely dated, and Lars is not a typical anything, but nobody is typical, which is the whole point. Interesting book.

[Leif Quinlan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the 4th book I've read in Dwight Garner's "American Beauties" series from back in 2016-17 and they have all been rightly championed by him. Though I enjoyed On Fire, A Childhood, and Elbowing the Seducer more than Travels with Lizbeth it was every bit as worthy as each of those. Eighner is a fine writer with a natural gift for pacing and subtlety that carried his story along buoyantly (I am left wondering much about him - his motivations, his mental state, &c. - that seems to me the mark of a well-written book) and his relationship and treatment of Lizbeth is wonderfully rendered. I enjoyed TWL while also getting a wide peek into a world I knew nothing about all while never feeling as if I were being preached to
This is an impressive book that deserves a wider readership

[Joan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book.

I feel bad saying a memoir is boring, but...

A review says Eighner's style is "simple," which it is. Far too simple to hold my interest, personally.

I'm no prude, nor am I at all homophobic, but I would have liked fewer descriptions of his sex life. Who he slept with while he was homeless is probably the last thing I wanted to know about. Perhaps the reason I was made uncomfortable by sex mentions was because I couldn't stop thinking about previous things he had said about his hygiene.

The afterword gave no explanation of what his life is like now, although he gives updates on every other person that was mentioned in the book. Apparently when he was writing the memoir he wanted to respect the privacy of the people mentioned, but when he later wrote the afterword he had no trouble revealing their full, real names and other personal details.

Perhaps this is nitpicky (and some would say pretentious. After all, this was written by a man who didn't exactly have a good life at the time he wrote this), but another thing that irritated me to no end was his insistence in referring to the mentally ill as "crazy" or "insane." I found his language concerning the mentally ill to be surprisingly hurtful considering he claims to have worked with them in the past.

The book does contain one good chapter, however. "On Dumpster Diving" has apparently been anthologized often, and it's easy to see why. My recommendation? Read "On Dumpster Diving," and skip the rest.

[Julian Dunn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eighner’s memoir of his years living an itinerant lifestyle, written in a uniquely sparse and no-nonsense style, provides a compelling account of the experience of being homeless for reasons other than the “usual”: in the end, Eighner is homeless because he’s a strange dude outside of the mainstream of society. This raises some interesting questions about society’s duty of care to such individuals. It’s not like they *choose* to be homeless per se but that their life choices lead to living on the fringes. Eighner himself realizes this and knows that technically, he could get a job that puts a roof over his head, except that which he is trained to do (be a mental health aide) is at odds with his ethics, belief system and identity. So while in no way does he “deserve” to be homeless, under our current capitalist system that essentially states that having a roof over one’s head is congruent only with some (monetary) value to society, homeless he is.

Overall it’s an incisive and biting commentary on the systems of social welfare that don’t actually help those in need and sadly, continues to be relevant over 30 years later.

[Marion Irwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this book after reading Lars Eighner's obituary in the New York Times. I had read "On Dumpster Diving" as an essay in a writing course I took about a decade ago.
It's a challenging read, because it's about a time when Eighner was homeless. He is so articulate, funny and bright that it's hard to understand at first how he came to that situation. But that's his point, and the fact that no one likes to face: this could happen to most people, given a few bad breaks.
It's also a matter of fact account of gay life in the eighties. AIDS, casual sexual encounters and biases all reported.
My favorite part is that he was so well informed about how the medical, social work and law and order systems worked, that he gives a great accounting of how they work against people whose real crime is being poor.
I believe this book will stand the test of time, because very little has changed in the 30 odd years since it was written. If the systems do change, it will stand as an important document of how things were.

[Ronni Shulman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very few books about homelessness are written from the perspective of the homeless. This is not a social treatise on homelessness per se, but rather a first person account of one man’s experience on the road with his dog in Texas, Arizona and California. He is educated and bright, and not mentally ill or drug or alcohol addicted, so he defies the stereotypes of the homeless. We read a detailed account of his experiences finding food, shelter and rides from one place to another. Like “Nickel & Dimed,” Barbara Ehrenrich’s account of her stint as a member of the working poor, this book is a must-read; giving a face to homelessness that may change some entrenched prejudices toward one of today’s most pressing social issues.

[Barbara Carter · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book held my interest, always wanting to know what was coming next. At times it felt as if I was travelling on the road with him and Lizbeth (his dog).
It’s a great book for understanding more about homelessness. “On dumpster diving” a section on the how-to of living from a dumpster.

He first became homeless after leaving a job he held for almost 10 years. The question I had asked myself was why did he not have a fear of homelessness, not seen it coming, and doing anything possible to have enough money to not become homeless. And maybe that is hindsight is called 20/20. Maybe he would have considered taking jobs that he wasn’t overqualified for, or felt they were beneath him he wouldn’t have slipped into homelessness.
He also decided that he would not beg or steal to survive.

Once you slip into homelessness getting out of the situation is not so simple. There are many rules about receiving food stamps and meeting certain requirements to receive other kind of help, and because he would not give up his dog Lisbeth it made finding a home pretty much impossible.
There were times he could have also received help if he was an alcoholic, a drug addict, or had a mental illness. So, it shows the many cracks in the system to fall through.

His dog was his companion he mainly travelled alone and did not hang out with groups of other men.
This book has some description gay sex scenes.
When I first picked this book up at a used book store, I had no idea that it was on the New York Times, or featured on another site as one of the fifty best memoirs in the past fifty years.

At times I almost felt that by being homeless it also provided him the material for writing some interesting stories and wondered if he’d allowed himself to become homeless in the first place just for the experience and writing material. Don’t know, just a thought.

[Jamie Collins · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had never heard of this book until I saw the author’s obituary earlier this year and spotted Steven Saylor’s name. While he was homeless Eighner mailed the pieces of this memoir to Saylor who helped him get it published. An excerpt from this called “On Dumpster Diving” is well known and has been anthologized a number of times.

It’s a gripping story, and the prose is strikingly elegant. Eighner lost his job in 1989 and became homeless for three years, along with his dog, during which he hitchhiked from Texas to California and back twice seeking help from friends and work as a writer, mostly of stories for gay men’s magazines.

One aspect of this is his practical experience of being homeless -- seeking food and shelter, being refused government assistance as an ostensibly able-bodied man with no documentation -- but it also relates the bizarre circumstances of the friends he contacted during this time, who had chaotic lives themselves; for instance, his friend Billy could be kind and helpful, but only for the first week of every month before he drank up his paycheck. The hitchhiking stories detail the many eccentricities of those drivers who are willing to give a ride to a large homeless man and his dog. Eighner also describes some sexual encounters in an offhand way that adds to the strangeness of the book.

His dog Lizbeth is an affectionate companion, and he keeps her (from being destroyed, as so many people advise) despite the many disadvantages of being burdened with her care as well as his own. He describes making her health and comfort a priority, and the most distressing chapter in the book is the one where she is taken to an animal shelter and Eighner is desperate for the money to rescue her.

Eigher’s prose has a distinctly straightforward “dispassionate tone”. He depicts himself as a reasonable, gentle, intelligent man with few vices other than tobacco and an inability to support himself, due at least in part by a lifetime of ill health. In the afterword, written twenty years later, he suggests that he probably has something like Asperger’s Syndrome. The success of this book boosted him out of poverty only briefly, and he was poor and in danger of homelessness for much of the rest of his life.

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was, especially for me, five years new to Austin an interesting read showing the changes of the area in just the past 10-30 years or so. Mr Eighner has an extensive vocabulary, with an imaginative grasp of the circumstances around us.

[JANEY MCGEARY · Rating 4 out of 5]

A gay man without substance abuse issues or alcoholism becomes homeless with his dog, Lizbeth. Eighner is prickly and funny and shows a more complete perspective than those of us on this side of the thin line.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Barbara · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are many reviews of this book on Goodreads. Please read them if you want an overview of this wonderful memoir.

I just reread this book again because we have a situation in my town of homeless people and their dogs. Unlike the author who neither drank on the road, did drugs or panhandled using his dog for sympathy, some of our homeless with dogs are addicts who exploit their dogs for sympathy and neglect and abuse their dogs.

This book holds up well on a second reading. All the colorful characters come to life again. I enjoyed his analysis of the welfare and healthcare systems which seem even more relevant today. His stay in the hospital was funny and heartbreaking at once. Eighnor comes off as a whimsical, smart as an whip, if a bit suspicious eccentric. He is a man far out of the mainstream - a gay, homeless guy. Yet I identified with his unwavering principles and above all the care and love he gives Lizbeth.

NYT Best 50 Memoirs

[Victoria · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Travels With Lizbeth, Lars Eighner chronicles his several years as a homeless man with his dog, Lizbeth, in the southwestern states (Austin, Texas and Los Angeles, California, and the hitchhiking adventures between the two). I found it to be an insightful and, at times, surprising look at the condition of being homeless. It is easy to make assumptions about the whole of the homeless condition and those who live it, but Eighner in many ways defies these assumptions. An educated writer who does not use drugs and rarely drinks, Eighner does not fit the stereotype of the Typical Homeless Man - and neither does, he reports, most of the rest of the homeless population.

From overarching insight to personal anecdote, this book both made me laugh and at times brought me to tears. It is a poignant story of a situation that so few of us ever come to understand.

[J.D. Romann · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the few books I've kept on my shelf, for two decades now, despite two cross-country moves. So pleased to see a 20th anniversary re-release of this moving memoir that stuck with me all these years, metaphorically and literally.

[Sylvia Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I learned about this book in a NY Times article on the 50 best memoirs. It is an older book that takes place during the AIDs crisis but it is still relevant with its experience of homelessness which is even worse today. The writing is mainly very good but can be uneven.

[Cyanemi · Rating 2 out of 5]

I did not like this book. I thought the author was extremely irresponsible sexually and also with his dog. Dogs should never be homeless.

[Richard Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book I've been pressing people for years. Read it over if you've read it once.

[Karl Kraus · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title is somewhat misleading, as there isn't all that much traveling -- the first quarter of the book and a little bit toward the end. But no matter. As an account of the author's experiences hitchhiking and camping out in places such as parks it's certainly worth reading, and not just from the sociological perspective. In fact, the chapters that are most superfluous to the "traveling" narrative may well be the most interesting: the (frequently anthologized) one on dumpster diving, for instance, or the author's justifiably cynical accounts of his run-ins with charitable organizations, government social programs, and the medical and social worker professions.

Points off for the occasional continuity lapse (it isn't until dozens of pages after the fact that we learn how the author "earned" his first five dollars on his travels) and for the writing style, which is frequently of the "Lookit me! I swallowed a dictionary!" school of prose: "depended" to mean "hung"; "apprehend" to mean "understand"; plus such 25-cent words as "popliteal" and "eleemosynary." These wouldn't have been so bad if the author hadn't given us such constructions as "me and Lizbeth," "he had browbeat," and "at least awhile longer." Of course, that's what editors are for -- how often did I, in my previous life (and no, I don't mean the historical Karl Kraus; he wouldn't have bothered with anyone else's less than perfect prose), have to knead and pummel mercilessly the prose of full professors until the results at least approached Basic English -- but so few publishers bother with editors, and so few editors are better than functionally literate. Oh well.

[David Ward · Rating 3 out of 5]

Travels With Lizbeth: Three Years on the Road and on the Streets by Lars Eighner (St. Martin’s Press 1993) (Biography) (4012).

This memoir offers a noteworthy peek into the “homeless and on the road” subculture and book genre. Author Lars Eighner was a gay homeless Texas author of some repute. After early success as an author of gay men’s porn fiction, he became homeless in the 1980s. For the next three years he and his canine companion Lizbeth travelled extensively across the American southwest. They lived a precarious existence in homeless camps (“hobo jungles”) or abandoned buildings. Eighner had no regular source of income from any source except for the occasional sale of porn fiction to various gay men’s magazines.

According to the author, as a matter of principle he did not beg, panhandle, or steal to meet his and Lizbeth’s needs. Eighner devoted an entire chapter to the art of “dumpster diving” including practical advice and instructions on how to safely select which dumpster finds might be safe to eat, though he mentions that he generally experienced regular monthly bouts of dysentery from eating spoiled and rotten dumpster food. Lars Eigner wrote succinctly, dispassionately, and with erudition about the entire experience.

Dog lovers take note: Worry not about how “the poor dog” survived the author’s lifestyle. The author took much better care of the pup than Eighner provided for himself. In fact, if anyone had cared about the author as much as the author loved the dog, they probably wouldn’t have been homeless in the first place.

My rating: 7/10, finished 12/25/24 (4012).

[Crosby · Rating 4 out of 5]

As far as literature is concerned, this book is far from great literature. Also, do not read the book if you are expecting a good dog-centered story. Lizbeth has her moments (& even gets one chapter in which her death appears imminent) but for the most part she is simply the author's loyal companion. What makes the book unique and worth the read is that it is a first hand account of the travails of a homeless person on the streets of Austin, Texas. Unlike the majority of homeless people, the author is sober, drug-free and not mentally impaired. He is also not a panhandler, yet despite all of this, he is still legitimately homeless. From his story we learn the life-giving art of dumpster diving (e.g. raid the UT-Austin dumpsters for the best stuff); why hitch-hiking is a very dangerous option if you want to move; why dealing with fellow homeless people is not often a good idea; why police are free to treat homeless however they please; why Austin's fire ants make sleeping on the ground nearly impossible; why it is almost impossible to get a roof over your head once you are homeless; etc etc and on top of this the author is a gay man who has sexual needs. The author writes in a matter of fact manner with a touch of humor. After reading the book, I feel like I know things about being homeless that I had never previously considered and that made the book a worthwhile read for me ( I even Googled to see whatever happened to the author and Lizbeth).

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

"On Dumpster Diving" was one of my favorite essays to teach out of the freshman comp reader when I taught at NAU. I had just moved from Austin to Flagstaff, so I felt more connected to it because of that- even if it was circumscribed to the refuse of a city 15 years older than the one I had left. And it contained practical advice for a graduate assistant living in a town that was known for its "poverty with a view." There was a robust community of freecyclers holding anarchist potlucks- so it was wise to know what to look out for at those dinner parties.

Reading about road trips right now- no matter how fraught- is appealing to me. Most of the book details his day-to-day struggles finding shelter in Austin or Los Angeles. It's a grind hampered by extraordinarily dysfunctional people, who- nevertheless- sometimes manage to pull through at critical moments, and rather than criticize his social network, he rightfully criticizes the systems supposedly designed to help poor people that left him without any resources. (The chapter on his phlebitis and time in the public hospital was especially alarming.) But the highlights for me were his times on the road- just the ability to do something so haphazardly and remain relatively unscathed- and still find the ability to write well amidst the chaos- at least sometimes. It's an incredible story.