The Girl's Guide To Homelessness

By Brianna Karp

Brianna Karp entered the workforce at age ten, supporting her mother and sister throughout her teen years in Southern California. Although her young life was scarred by violence and abuse, Karp stayed focused on her dream of a steady job and a home of her own. By age twenty–two her dream became reality. Karp loved her job as an executive assistant and signed the lease on a tiny cottage near the beach.

Then the Great Recession hit. Karp, like millions of others, lost her job. In the six months between the day she was laid off and the day she was forced out onto the street, Karp scrambled for temp work and filed hundreds of job applications, only to find all doors closed. When she inherited a thirty–foot travel trailer after her father's suicide, Karp parked it in a Walmart parking lot and began to blog about her search for work and a way back.

Karp began her journey as a homeless person terrified and ashamed. Fear turned to awe as she connected with others in her same position whose remarkable stories inspired her to become an activist for the homeless community.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Jan 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781460810705

Brianna Karp

BRIANNA KARP is a passionate advocate and spokesperson for the homeless. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Visit her at GirlsGuidetoHomelessness.com.

Book preview

Prologue

The Walmart lot was cold in the night air, even for southern California. I hadn’t brought enough blankets and would need to swing by the thrift store and pick up a few more. Everything was well-lit by the streetlamps and eerily quiet. There were maybe a dozen other trailers around when I arrived, but no sign that actual people might live in them at all. I had once visited Calico Ghost Town, an old abandoned mining settlement in the hills outside San Bernardino, and this had that same sense of deathly desertion. I knew they were there, perhaps even peeking out their windows at the newcomer, but I couldn’t see or hear any of them.

Were any of the others like me? Were the rest of them just passing through? Was I the only one idiotic enough to think I could pull off a stunt like this?

Irrational fear swept through me. How could I sleep? I was more weary than I’d been in a long time, but I flicked on a solitary flashlight and tried to read a book, although you couldn’t exactly call it reading. It was more like staring blankly at the page, eyes racing over the words without comprehension as my mind created scenarios one after the other, each more horrible than the last. What if I awoke to the brisk tapping of police batons on my windows? What if they knew I was planning on staying here longer than a night or two? What if they could sense it? What if I awoke at a tilt, all my boxes hurtling from one end of the trailer toward my head, as a tow truck dragged me away, screeching for help, muffled and buried under hundreds of books?

I had never much thought about homelessness or homeless people. Sure, there was the occasional hobo on the street, perhaps lounging on the sidewalk outside a 7-Eleven, begging for change, ragged, perhaps with a worn ski cap on, maybe missing a few teeth, with scraggly hair and a wizened visage.

Don’t make eye contact with them, my mother would say, jerking me to her side, not even bothering to whisper or even lower her voice. She spoke about them as if they couldn’t hear or understand her, or as if they had no feelings to hurt. I never really thought to question that. It was just another stereotype repeated to me, ad nauseam, from infancy.

They’re just lazy bums. Too lazy to get a job. Don’t look at them, don’t talk to them and don’t give them anything. Half of them aren’t even really homeless, you know. They’re just faking it to make money without actually having to do anything.

I had never thought about how those homeless people ended up there. I had never once thought to ask, Why would a lazy person choose that life? It seems like a really hard, scary, uncertain life. It seems like the last kind of life a lazy jackass would choose.

I was ashamed of myself, thinking back on it. In a way, this was my atonement, my penance for being so self-righteous all those years. Serves me right, I realized wildly.

It was Thursday, February 26, 2009. I was homeless.

But then, it’s not really enough to tell you that I’m homeless, is it? You want to know who the hell I am and how I got here.

Chapter One

I’m trying to decide whether it’s fair or not to say that insanity runs in my blood.

Certainly it’s a statement with which many of my family members would, shall we say, take umbrage. But I don’t know that it’s much of a stretch, from an outsider’s perspective. I’m not talking about the kooky, madcap, adorably dysfunctional brand of crazy, either. The Moonstruck-style family with their over-the-top yelling and gesticulating, followed by reconciliations and hugs and kisses and banquet-reunion meals. The bighearted kind of crazy.

That’s not my family. My lineage runs more along the batshit-fucking-nuts crazy train.

As you might imagine, this is enough to give a girl a massive mind trip. There’s always that underlying paranoia—wondering whether I have miraculously broken the mold and escaped the curse, or whether the insanity is buried and brewing just below the surface, lying dormant and awaiting the inevitable breakout.

I was born a fourth-generation Jehovah’s Witness. There wasn’t much choice in the matter. On my mother’s side, the JW heritage goes all the way back to my great-grandparents— Polish immigrants to Canada who met on a bus one day in the early 1900s, discovered they each thought the other looked pretty spicy and married a week later. Mary and TaTa Mazur would later convert to the Bible Students, renamed Jehovah’s Witnesses in 1931, and pump out nine devout Jehovah’s Witness children up through the Great Depression, one of whom was my grandmother, Iris, the youngest and the black sheep and hell-raiser of the family.

The Mazur clan would later tell stories of their persecution as Jehovah’s Witnesses during both world wars, including the ban on the religion in Canada from 1940 to 1943, when members organized an underground resistance. My grandmother would affectionately relate stories of her father’s imprisonment when he was caught distributing JW pamphlets, only to find himself the first known believer to be thrown out of jail for singing religious hymns in Polish at the top of his lungs (and horrendously out of tune), distressing prison guards and inmates alike.

I know, I know, it all sounds very charming and warms-the-cockles-of-your-heart so far, doesn’t it? Believe me, there are plenty more stories where those came from. JWs thrive on the martyr complex, since they believe that the Bible prophesied that members of the One True Religion would be greatly persecuted. Therefore, I’ve heard every variation of the chuckle-worthy tale in which oppressed Jehovah’s Witnesses pull one over on their tormentors.

But.

My great-grandparents also claimed to be of the anointed. In JW-speak, this means that they believed Jehovah God had spoken to them and revealed that they were among the elite 144,000 chosen ones, selected to go to heaven and reign alongside Him as kings once He brought about a prophesied New Order of Things. This new order, Jehovah’s Witnesses believe, involves the brutal destruction of every nonbeliever at a bloody, apocalyptic Armageddon showdown, and the subsequent building of a Paradise Earth populated solely by—you guessed it—the rest of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the ones not chosen to reign as kings in heaven. They don’t tell you this stuff on your doorstep, do they?

So. Two ancestors hearing voices and with delusions of kingly grandeur. Check.

My grandmother, Iris, despite a few young years of running wild, raising Cain and living something of a double life few Witnesses would have approved of, remains in the religion to this day. She attends a Kingdom Hall (JWs don’t call them churches; they consider churches pagan and of false religion) in California, where she moved and settled down with my grandfather, Jeremiah. They are now divorced, but he is also a Jehovah’s Witness and lives a relatively sweet, unassuming life under the radar in Alabama with his second wife.

Iris Wallingford, née Mazur, carried on the precedent of crazy and inflated it to (apologies in advance for the pun) epic biblical proportions. According to family lore, she abused her three daughters physically, mentally and emotionally. Legendary tales of her heaving vacuum cleaners through the air at their heads, dragging them along the hallway by their hair until it came out by the roots in clumps or grinding pencil lead deep into their knees as they squirmed and fidgeted during two-hour Kingdom Hall meeting sessions were a staple of my childhood. This is all, of course, merely what I’ve gleaned from multiple sources’ whispered tales, including those of family members and friends…but do I believe there’s at least some truth to it? Yep. All three girls were destined to run away from home at a young age. First Louisa, the eldest, split for Hawaii, followed by my mother, Linda, at age sixteen. Mom dropped out of high school, took her GED exam and lived on Oahu with Louisa (who had spiraled into drug use) for a year or so before returning to California. Charisse, the youngest, possibly had it the worst—she was afflicted with a severe, lifelong form of alopecia, which caused her to lose her hair and endure torment at school as well as at home. Upon leaving home, she searched for solace in the arms of men, hopping from one to another and sinking two marriages with kind, loving (and non-JW) husbands due to compulsive infidelity. As of this writing, she is imprisoned in Illinois for a period of twelve years, convicted of vehicular manslaughter committed while driving under the influence for the third time. I have not seen her in ages, but, according to family members, she has also had problems with illegal drugs for years and has been disfellowshipped, or excommunicated, from the Jehovah’s Witnesses at least twice. Her two young children are cared for by her non-JW ex-husband, so I hold out hope that they may yet have a quasi-normal life, despite everything.

My grandmother, meanwhile, spends most of her time in a rocking chair in front of the TV at home. Once a slim, lovely young woman with mischievous eyes who attracted men like flies to honey, she has ballooned to ghastly proportions and relies on a walker to get from place to place. Her house is in a condemnable, Grey Gardens state—decades of hoarded trash and junk piled from floor to ceiling, with the exception of walking paths hewn out from room to room. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen McDonald’s containers in there dating back to the 1960s. You think I’m kidding? In Iris Wallingford’s warped mind, every bit of junk is a treasure or a memory to add to the magpie’s nest. In the past, I have attempted to spend time with my grandma, but could only ever handle her in small doses, as her grating chief hobby is living in the past, reliving imaginary grudges and slights dating back some seventy-odd years. Many of these are against her own brothers and sisters, all but one already passed on—respect for the dead means nothing to her. She and my mother hate each other with a passion. Although they attend the same congregation, they don’t speak, but always have an arsenal of nasty digs on hand ready to fling at the other. Despite Iris’s extraordinary disregard for her own health, which would seem to invite the most massive heart attack in the history of heart attacks, my mother jokes grimly that Iris will outlive us all out of spite.

I tell these stories because I think it’s important for me to establish up front, before I go into my own saga, that I believe I understand, or at least try to understand, why my mother is the way she is. For much of her life, she was indeed victimized—pair cult indoctrination from birth with unabated abuse by a bitter, raving 350-pound maniac, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. To this day, I don’t know exactly how much of my mother’s own particular instability is a product of nature or nurture, but I’ve got my suspicions that one didn’t exactly help the other.

Having returned from her less-than-successful jaunt to Hawaii, which left her broke and disillusioned for such a young kid, my mother endured a brief period of abuse again at home with Iris. At eighteen, by Jehovah’s Witness standards she was actually an old maid, though she was young, lovely and vivacious—popular at school, something of a class clown in compensation for the dark home life of which she was so ashamed. She finally escaped (or so she thought) by marrying the first man she could at nineteen, and getting pregnant with me right away.

Bob Neville. Bob was not short for Robert. Just plain Bob. He was a gawky, scarecrow-esque kid a year older than my mother, most often said to resemble Peter Pan. He definitely didn’t look like a monster.

Mom met him at the moped repair shop after an unfortunate accident in which a neighbor backing out of his driveway neglected to notice her coming up the street and ran over her scooter. She would later point out to me the hedge that had obscured the driver’s vision: If it weren’t for that hedge, you would never have been born! She would come to regret that damn hedge.

Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t date non–Jehovah’s Witnesses, and they definitely aren’t supposed to marry them. They view it as marrying a walking corpse—what’s the point of falling in love with someone the great and powerful Jehovah is just going to roast with a flaming meteorite at Armageddon, anyway? Members can be privately counseled, publicly reproved, disciplined or even disfellowshipped and shunned for pursuing a relationship with a nonbeliever. Ergo, Bob accepted a Bible study with my mother, toward the goal of conversion, and they married quickly and furtively. I was born March 6, 1985.

Bob turned out to be the classic wife beater, belying his sweetly youthful appearance. My mother claims that a week after their wedding, he woke her up in the middle of the night, accused her of cheating on him, bundled her into the car and drove her out to the desert in silence, pausing to open the door and shove her out into the sand, dumping her in only a T-shirt and no underwear. Then he drove home and went back to sleep while she walked until her feet were bloody, finally hitching a ride home from a concerned passing motorist and his wife around dawn. Other stories centered around the time Bob put my mother through a wall in their house, leaving a perfect Linda-shaped indent, and when he picked up a set of heavy stone coasters from the coffee table and started bashing his own forehead in during an argument until blood spurted and coated the furniture, all the while screaming at her as though bestowing an unavoidable curse.

Look how much I love you! I’ll even hurt myself for you! Look what you’re making me do to myself! Look what you’re making me do to you!

I hurt you because I love you. Of course. It was a constant refrain of his, definitely not the most original line ever thought up by an abusive husband. Interestingly, it would turn out to be a recurring theme in my own life as well, that persistent, lingering stench you just can’t get rid of no matter how hard you scrub.

My mother became pregnant again with my little sister, Molly, mere months after my birth. My sister was born on May 7, 1986 with a congenital defect requiring open-heart surgery, which set the local congregation elders in a tizzy. At that time, only a handful of infants had ever received bloodless heart surgery, and Jehovah’s Witnesses apply the archaic biblical command to abstain from blood (Acts 15:29) to the ultimate possible literal interpretation—blood pudding isn’t the only no-no! The command was previously misapplied to organ transplants, considered cannibalism, for many years. However, new light from Jehovah eventually revealed to the old men in the head honcho seat in Brooklyn, the Governing Body of Jehovah’s Witnesses, that—oops!—organ transplants (and later blood fractions, though not whole blood itself) were OK after all. Sorry about all those faithful Witnesses who died (or allowed their children to die) under the old light, folks. Move along, nothing to see here.

At the time of my sister’s birth, however, even the use of medical treatments utilizing blood fractions, such as plasma, albumin, immunoglobulins and the like, were not an option for members (they didn’t become a conscience matter for Jehovah’s Witnesses until 1989, when Molly was three years old), and my mom, barely more than a kid herself, was beset upon by elders waving power of attorney forms in her face. Molly’s primary hospital insisted that she required a blood transfusion, and that they were prepared to go to court to seek and enforce an injunction making sure she received it. The circus reached its peak when my mother snatched my little sister from the local hospital and took her to Texas, where Dr. Denton Cooley, the world’s foremost blood-free surgeon (and at the time, one of only two in the United States who performed such procedures on children), completed the two operations that would save Molly’s life and leave her with her two scars: a thick, ropey one all the way down from sternum to belly button, and a thin crescent-shaped one under her left breast, toward her armpit. Though only a year old at the time, I distinctly recall the sight of my frail, emaciated sister in a hospital crib, wailing, covered in tubes and surrounded by stuffed animals my mother purchased for her. Her crib and hospital apparatus were all covered in large stickers bearing the words Jehovah’s Witness—No Blood! Moll’s recovery and success story were heralded by Jehovah’s Witnesses everywhere as a triumph of Jehovah over Satan, and proof that their religion’s ways were the best after all.

Though Mom attempted to escape her abusive marriage, however, the congregation elders were having none of it. Despite the angry bruises and welts covering her from head to toe, and an unpleasant incident in which Bob leaped up on the hood of our van in the parking lot of the Kingdom Hall (in front of dozens of witnesses) as my mother attempted to flee and I screamed in confused terror in the backseat, they advised her to wait on Jehovah, be a better wife and perhaps things would get better. Divorce is scripturally prohibited for Jehovah’s Witnesses, except in the case of adultery. Even abused spouses are advised to remain in their dead-end marriages and set a good example for their abuser, that he might be won over without a word. (Read: Maybe if you’re really, really nice to him, he’ll realize what a jackass he’s been, feel sorry and repent. Even if it takes a decade or three.)

And, they said, if he did kill her, as he threatened and she feared, she would be resurrected to Paradise. God would fix everything eventually. Just not right now.

Despite the ire of the elders, my mother finally filed for divorce when I was two years old, amid the debacle of Molly’s operations. The congregation warned her that, though she might be legally free, scripturally Jehovah still considered her married. She was not allowed to date or remarry until Bob shacked up with another woman and admitted infidelity. Still obsessed with her, and as a particularly sadistic form of torment, he stubbornly refused for the longest time to give her grounds for a scriptural divorce in the eyes of the Witnesses.

In the meantime, the courts ruled for weekend visitation with Bob, who had moved into his mother’s garage. I, and sometimes Molly—when she wasn’t in the hospital—would visit him on and off for another year or so (when he would actually show up for pickup). During much of this period, I suppose you could say I found myself the object of my father’s affection, the apple of his eye. Without preamble, he apparently developed a taste for some of the more repugnant, deviant acts known to man, and foisted upon me the sort of fondlings and sexual acts that are normally reserved for awkward, fumbling sixteen-year-olds in the back of cars, except that I was two and very much confused by the entire thing. I knew one thing, though. If I wanted my Happy Meal toy, I would be a good girl and kiss Daddy’s cock and let him put his fingers (and on one memorable occasion, a striped yellow-and-red McDonald’s soda straw) inside me without crying while he showed me how he could make it do special tricks, like peeing thick white globby stuff instead of regular yellow pee. Then I would fall asleep feeling oddly wrong, wondering whether that blue plastic toy camel with wrinkled knees at the bottom of the bag was worth it all. This was our special secret, though, and I couldn’t tell Mommy or very bad things would happen to Daddy. I didn’t want that, did I? Of course not. Besides, with all the attention swirling around Molly and her health since her birth, I often felt lonely, with nobody to play with. At least somebody was spending time with me again. I took it as proof that Daddy really did love me, even though he made lots of mistakes with Mommy when they were married.

I vividly remember pointing to my mother on our front lawn one day as she watered the plants with a long, curved garden hose, and giggling at the stream of water.

It looks like you’re holding Daddy’s penis in your hand! Her face clouded over, and she shook her finger at me.

"That is not a nice thing to say! That’s not funny, we don’t use words like that in public."

Oops. I knew immediately that I had made a mistake. I had almost ruined Daddy’s and my special secret. I had almost precipitated very bad things. I resolved to keep my mouth shut and not let it happen again. A few days later, when my mother sat me down and explained to me about private parts and the proper words for them, and how I was never ever to let anybody touch me down there, and tell her immediately if they did, I nodded my head serenely and gave her my chubby-cheeked cherub smile. Nobody was going to trick me into giving up our special secret ever again.

In any event, Bob soon found himself a girlfriend, Charlie, about my mom’s age and type: brunette, innocent, wide-eyed and naïve. My mom was overjoyed—she was scripturally free, and she correctly surmised that Charlie would take her place as the object of his obsession, slowly removing him from our lives. Charlie was a kind, warm-hearted person and she seemed to adore Molly and me. I liked her so much I didn’t even mind when they got an apartment together and she took my place in Daddy’s bed at night, and the attention from him quickly waned. She did sweet things like read us stories and make us sandwiches when we visited: Bob was now too busy to play with us. The visits grew further and further apart, until finally he just didn’t show up at all, ever again, without my ever fully noticing or comprehending.

My mom went on to marry Joseph Karp, from a neighboring congregation, when I was six. Joe was the exact opposite of Bob, to a fault. He was the human equivalent of Kermit the Frog—harmlessly pleasant, somewhat oblivious, mild-tempered, sweetly goofy and a redheaded twenty-seven-year-old virgin. His day had finally come. Even as a single mom with a heretofore rough past and two young children, Linda Simpson was still gorgeous.

After a careful year of courtship, quite prolonged according to JW standards, my mother bucked the tradition of marrying humbly and quietly in the local Kingdom Hall and instead chose to hold the ceremony at a rose garden in Anaheim, spawning a rash of clucking henlike gossip from all the high-and-mighty elders’ wives. The wedding was the event of the decade in JW-land; three hundred attendees strong. Molly and I were the flower girls, in peach velvet-and-tulle dresses and baby’s breath hair wreaths, drawing coos and awwwwws as we held hands and wicker baskets of peach roses, carefully preceding my mom down the aisle in her sequin-appliquéd white, mermaid-style dress and poufy curled pompadour. I was excited to have a new daddy. I had been nervous at first, hoping that this daddy wouldn’t require any embarrassing and painful special nighttime activities, but Joe did only nice things, like give me wild, bucking horsey-back rides on the fluorescent-orange carpet at home; tickle me until I screamed with laughter; and teach me how to play chess. He would make a good daddy, I thought.

I guess it was inevitable, though sad, that their marriage would be a star-crossed affair, though not apparently doomed from the start.

For one thing, Joe was considered pretty wishy-washy as far as the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ interpretation of the biblical arrangement of headship went. In other words, he was just too damn nice to keep his hotheaded hussy of a wife in line, as God required of him. My mother, on the other hand, didn’t seem to know what to do with herself in a relationship with such a passive man—she had gone from one marital extreme to another. Formerly, she had been fighting to protect her daughters and herself from a psychotic monster. Now she felt she had to continue fighting, even though there was little to fight over, other than Joe being something of a weak-willed, meek wuss. She believed what she had been taught all her life, that she should be in subjection to her husband, but she also had not a single submissive bone in her body. So slowly that we barely noticed it happening, until it seemed like one day it burst out into the open and tore our life asunder, my mother began to take on the persona of a nagging, abusive harpy.

There were three good years of marriage between them, up until I turned nine. Prior to then, I remember my mother the way many others still do—the youngest, prettiest mommy of all the mommies in the world. A woman who loved and fiercely protected Moll and me. Even when life was rough, before meeting Joe, and she had to bundle us sleepily into our old Plymouth Voyager at 4:00 a.m. and go polish FedEx drop boxes to earn money to feed us, she found ways to make it fun, not allowing her desperation and misery to seep through the cracks and poison her daughters. Though she took discipline seriously, when we were little it was never harsh or unwarranted. We always felt loved and adored by our mommy.

That would change.

Chapter Two

It was mid-January 2009, in Brea Jamba Juice, while begging my cheating ex-boyfriend not to leave me for his costar in a chintzy murder mystery dinner theater, that I learned that my biological father had offed himself with a Remington12 gauge. I was twenty-three years old.

One moment I was self-medicating, drinking in, like a carefully rationed narcotic, Dennis’s placid voice asking me how I was, what was new, placating me with the tired words I had come to dread: I just need more time to make up my mind (ask me now why I never threw a pomegranate smoothie over the asshole’s head and walked out for good—I have no answer for you). The next, my BlackBerry rang, a Los Angeles number, and I picked it up, assuming that it was a call for an interview from one of several LA jobs I had applied for.

Ms. Karp? My name is Joyce Cato. I’m calling you regarding a Bob Jason Neville, the woman on the end of the line began. She had a kind voice, but I was immediately on the defensive. Oh, my god, he’s tracked me down. I couldn’t understand why or how, but he had done it. I knew it.

My mind was a maelstrom of panic. I didn’t want to allow any of this back into my life. I had spent the previous week telling my therapist the little that I remembered about this man, about the things that he used to do to me, to my mother, and the nightmares that had burst into my head six months earlier—some long-delayed trauma reaction that forced me awake, sobbing several times a week, terrifying me so much that I couldn’t go back to sleep, setting me on edge and completely annihilating my once-comfortable relationship with Dennis, who couldn’t handle disturbances of this kind. He promptly decided that starting a relationship with some common actress (without the convenience of actually breaking up with me first) was somehow the most sensible plan of action. Mysti, I believe was her name. What the hell kind of a name is Mysti, anyway? I wondered, bitterly. I had no idea what she looked like, but in my wishful thinking she was a trampy bimbo with blonde extensions, a horsey face, fake boobs and a SoCal tan, spouting the platitudes that so many actors keep handily tucked under one arm to prove their depth to the skeptical world.

I found out about Mysti two days before Christmas. In some subconscious layer of being, I knew, and when I asked, Who is she? I prayed that Dennis would respond that he hadn’t the foggiest idea what I was talking about. Instead, he looked stricken, but didn’t deny it; he later told me that, having paused for far too long before responding, he realized that he could no longer make

Reviews for The Girl's Guide To Homelessness

[oddbooks · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

This? This is not a guide to homelessness. It's a revenge novel. And there's nothing wrong with revenge novels. Djuna Barnes, D.H. Lawrence and Leopold Woolf all penned revenge novels and no one holds that against them. Sometimes you just gotta unleash on those who may deserve it. It's just best to be honest about one's motives. For example, if one is getting revenge on a bad boyfriend, abusive parents, a weak stepfather and a shitheel who tricked you into paying for many expensive gifts even though you were homeless even as he was living with another woman, don't insinuate that the book is a memoir about being homeless.Lots of people take issue with this book's veracity, and I understand that. The whole scene with Nancy Grace as Fox commentator certain calls into question Brianna's recall. This book is so teeming with WTF-moments that I too also wonder about the truth behind some of Karp's text. But I find really unappealing all of the poverty and homeless Olympics reactions this book has generated. Here's the thing: If your only place to crash is a travel trailer and the only place you can park it is in a Wal-Mart parking lot, you're homeless. People who quibble over Karp owning a cell phone and a laptop - the insinuation being that she should have sold them in order to... I don't know, have half a deposit for an apartment she couldn't afford? - are idiots. One cannot find a proper job these days without a computer, a phone and access to the Internet. Had she sold them, she would have been in even more dire straits.All the more appalling is the notion that Karp was not poor enough. She was overweight, she dyed her hair, she kept all her books, she didn't get rid of her dog when her dog was all she felt she had left in the world... Surely if she was homeless she would have been skin and bones, her hair would have roots, she would have given up her pet, she would never have drunk a single coffee from Starbucks, etc. We really like our poor and homeless to be ragged, humbled and showing appropriate shame. They can have no small luxuries, they can have no small comforts. They must drink water, eat gruel and show themselves worthy of praise for being good poor people. No one should dislike this book because Brianna Karp slept in a travel trailer in a parking lot and therefore was not sleeping on the pavement and homeless as homeless can be (do such people not consider people who sleep in their cars homeless because they are not exposed to the elements, one wonders) or because she was not a Good Poor Person. People should dislike this book because it is, at its heart, dishonest.The book's title hit most people for a loop when they read the book. For a book that touts itself as a guide to homelessness, Brianna offers at most thirty full pages of information about how one can function when homeless, and much of it is stale information. I was unaware of the fact that Wal-Mart allows motor homes to stay in their parking lots, but if I know about how to get cheap WiFi and that a gym membership enables one to shower when one has no bathroom, surely others do as well. I think most people know that when one lacks a refrigerator, one is going to be eating a lot of shelf-stable meals. Brianna offered very little information on how to navigate the homeless world beyond "make sure your horrible father dies and leaves you a travel trailer before your mom throws you out and then camp out at Wal-Mart for as long as you can, eating ramen and hanging out at Starbucks when it gets too hot."That's a problem. A big problem.Also problematic is that Brianna is a foolish young woman. Very foolish. And an entire book of her foolishness is only worth reading because of the trainwreck factor. In many respects, this book reminded me of the early days of LiveJournal, when everyone shared every damn thing about themselves to the point that they had so many readers who stuck around to see what would happen next to the lunatic writer. That trainwreck factor is the only reason I kept reading and it will not be enough to make me spend more money on one of Brianna's books in the future.And just to be clear, I was a complete idiot until I was 35 or so. I am so very glad I never created a blog before I was 30 or had a chance to immortalize my foolishness in a book. It's sad because Brianna, despite being foolish, is likable and intelligent. But the damn foolishness was all I could focus on.Here's a list of some of her damn foolishness, and in this there is some crossover into the WTF!/did this really happen territory:--Brianna, while homeless, clearly made the choice to live as a nomad. This is a problem when one is writing a book about homelessness. Because a deliberate nomad decides permanent shelter is not a priority and therefore can spend money buying her crappy Scottish boyfriend a ticket to come visit her, hotel rooms so they can romp while watching TV, his and her engagement rings, her own airfare to Scotland, a new car when her car bites the dust, and so many more large ticket purchases that I, a suburban homeowner with a moderate savings account, could not justify. And again, that's cool. It's just better to be honest and, say, call your blog and your book The Girl's Guide to Nomadic Living.--The extraordinary amounts of money Brianna spent on non-essentials when she was ostensibly saving to have a permanent home brings us to the foolishness she had in her relationship with Matt, the Scottish loser. I cut her some slack here, because a crappy childhood can leave one prey to con artists and shysters. Perhaps she really did feel this formerly homeless dude she had spent remarkably little time with really was the love of her life and therefore it was not a problem he had gotten another girl pregnant. Perhaps she really felt she was building a life with this man even though she was homeless and he lived on another continent and was often broke, but even so, perhaps his incipient fatherhood combined with his seeming nonchalance with her spending money on him, money she needed to put toward finding a home, should have been a clue.--The visit to Scotland. Oh, the visit to Scotland. Our heroine Brianna, despite having an IUD, got knocked up. She conveniently "forgot" and left the pregnancy test in the bathroom of the new trailer she was renting (her travel trailer got towed and impounded in a whole other mess), ensuring a bit of drama when her landlord let people stay there while she was gone. In fact, at times I felt like I was reading The Girl's Guide to Personality Disorders. But anyway, she got knocked up and wanted to fly to Scotland to surprise Matt with the good news, that he was going to be a father to a new baby he couldn't afford and that she couldn't properly house. Hurrah! Anyway, she shows up and finds out he lives with the woman he claimed was never his girlfriend in the first place and the baby mama is none too pleased to see Brianna standing there.Matt, being the complete wiener he surely is, turned Brianna away, telling her to get a hotel room. She got locked in because the owners forgot she was there on Christmas, leaving her with no food but creamer. She meets with Matt finally, he tells her lies, she believes him. Time passes, he tells her lies, she believes him. She agrees to meet him at a train station that is not open during the holiday. She waits there for hours and hours, finally wandering off in the brutal cold, forcing concerned locals to help her because she clearly was too daft to not come in from the cold, even as she was snowed on.She miscarries. She wraps the baby, which is developed enough to see is a boy, up in a towel and tosses it in a river, as you do. She finally understands Matt is a crap heap and comes back to the USA and writes this book to smear his name but good. --And if elements of the Scotland trip seem odd to you, like continuing to believe a man who clearly is lying to you, or tossing a fetus into a river seem a bit WTF! to you, you are not alone. Jesus. Add to it that she bleeds all over the place, essentially gives birth to a stillborn baby, uses towels as pads to staunch her blood flow, and no one confronts her? And even better, she named the wee fetus before tossing it into the river. Which seems super likely. Just so I am clear about how much time Brianna spends talking about her quasi relationship with Matt, he enters her life on page 133. From there on out it is nothing but Matt, Matt, Matt until page 325 or so. This is a book about a failed relationship, not about being homeless. The purpose of this book was to smear Matt, not to discuss the tactics of being homeless. It is all the more horrible to note that I am only hitting on some of the appalling problems I encountered reading the book. Should you read elsewhere, you will find people who knew her dispute major chunks of the book. Hot mess doesn't even begin to cover it. That sucks because I entered this book wanting to love it. So, I read this revenge novel and kept reading because I wanted to see the train derail. And it did. And I wish Harlequin had not published this book because I think Karp will be associated with her foolishness forever and that future jobs and future writing gigs may end up thin on the ground.

[readhanded · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In The Girl's Guide to Homelessness, Brianna Karp talks about her experiences when she finds herself unexpectedly homeless after a string of unfortunate events, including losing a good job as the economy tanked.Throughout the memoir, Karp works to splinter the stereotypes that her readers may have about homelessness and homeless people. She has shelter - a travel trailer she inherited when her father died, she has a laptop and a cell phone, she's clean, well-educated, articulate. As she struggles with finding permanent work and a permanent address, Karp becomes an advocate for the homeless. She starts a blog, also called The Girl's Guide to Homelessness, and connects online with other advocates around the world.Karp anticipates that her readers are going to think, "Well, she's not really homeless - she's not the typical homeless person." She aims to dispel that type of thinking. In actuality, there is no "typical" homeless person. All are different, all have different circumstances and different resources, and all are reminders of what could happen to any of us.The Girl's Guide to Homelessness, however, is about more than a girl being homeless. It's also about her struggles with family, love, and finding her own place in the world. Karp details her difficult childhood raised as a Jehovah's Witness by an abusive, angry mother and a caring but weak step-father. She talks about her love relationships, including a serious one with a man she meets online while homeless.The memoir is fast-paced and easy to read, though Karp does include several long discourses, almost rants, on topics about which she is passionate. As the book progressed it started to irk me that Karp, otherwise a capable, strong-willed, independent woman, acts so foolishly when a man is involved. She develops a long distance relationship with a quasi-homeless man (he has a government-owned flat, but is not self-supporting) in Scotland, and then spends much of her savings to fly him to California and back, twice, so they can meet in person and borrows money from a friend so that she can fly to Scotland to see him for Christmas. Of course, hindsight is twenty/twenty, and maybe if the relationship had worked out, true love, etc. etc. that money would have been well spent. And of course, Brianna was expecting a happy ending, so it certainly made sense to her at the time to invest that money in her future happiness. Still, though...If you read The Girl's Guide to Homelessness, you can expect strong opinions, distressing situations, and insight into a life that is likely different than your own. I appreciated reading about Karp's experiences, but I don't think it's a must-read.

[samsattler · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I have just about sorted through all my misgivings about Brianna Karp’s memoir, The Girl’s Guide to Homelessness, but I am still not entirely sure how I feel about the book. So, perhaps, it is best to start at the beginning – with the book’s title. While it is true that the author may have met the “technical” definition of homelessness for a good portion of the book, I am not convinced that she meets the “spirit” of that definition.According to Karp, she lost her job and could no longer afford to lease the “tiny cottage near the beach” in which she had been living. Consequently, on February 26, 2009, she found herself living in a travel trailer on a California Walmart parking lot (as part of a tiny community of trailers parked there with the tacit blessing of the company). She did have to rely on businesses for bathroom facilities until she found a cheap gym membership that gave her access to its showers, but Karp had a private shelter all her own to sleep in each night. Too, it appears that Karp was unsure enough about calling herself “homeless” that she decided to include a rather definitive definition of the word at the beginning of the book. Two portions of that definition can probably be stretched far enough to qualify her (italics are mine).“an individual who lacks a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence”“a public or private place not designed for, or ordinarily used as, a regular sleeping accommodation for human beings”Wisely, Karp held on to her laptop and her cell phone and turned the closest Starbucks into her daytime home until she found work again. Unfortunately for her, whatever work she found was either of the distasteful variety or never paid enough for her to make much headway in saving the amount of money needed to move to permanent housing. She was faced with some hard choices – and she did not always choose wisely. To Karp’s credit, she did reluctantly find a new home for her large dog after realizing that leaving him cooped up in a small, hot trailer all day while she was out was both cruel and dangerous. That was smart. Not so smart, was the way she handled her relationship with a British homeless advocate she met on the internet. After the two grew close, Karp used most of her precious savings to fly him to California to make sure that they were as compatible in person as they were virtually. She even paid for a second round trip after the man had to return to Scotland to deal with the birth of his illegitimate child there. She bought him a netbook – and she bought herself a roundtrip ticket to Scotland to surprise him at Christmas. But she was still “homeless.”Much of The Girl’s Guide to Homelessness covers the dysfunctional, fourth generation Jehovah’s Witnesses family in which she grew up; the suicide of her abusive father; and her continuing, poor relationship with her mother and sister. And the largest portion of the book deals with her romance with her British lover and its unsurprising culmination, so, despite its title, this is hardly a book about homelessness.I include the following quote because it makes me question the overall accuracy of Karp’s presentation of her life. It is something she supposedly said to her British boyfriend when he complained about the quality of television news programming in the United States:“Baby, you can’t watch this. This is Fox News. It’s not real news. No wonder.” Duh. I grabbed the remote from his hand before he could hurl it at Nancy Grace’s monologuing face. “How about we try a little CNN? That should be more to your taste.”Since Nancy Grace has long been a mainstay of CNN’s Headline News channel, I have to wonder if Karp was as careless with the rest of the “truth” in her book as she was with this gratuitous attack on Fox. She and her Harlequin editors, in their apparent zeal to take their shot at Fox News, twist the real picture to suit their purposes – making me wonder what else in the book might have been twisted.I’m rating the The Girl’s Guide to Homelessness at three stars because it makes for interesting reading. I only wish I were more confident that it all really happened this way.Rated at: 3.0

[nightprose · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Brianna Karp is on a mission. She has a purpose. She did not choose it, but she chose to take what life dealt her and to use it for good.Brianna has had a difficult life. From the early age of ten she was forced to work to support her mother and sister. Violence and abuse was a way of life for her. Through perseverance and determination, she fought her way out of it.Finally, barely into her twenties, Brianna thought she had paid her dues. She had a good job and a place of her own. When the Recession hit, a series of events caused Brianna to lose it all. She found herself homeless.Inheriting her father’s travel trailer and having nowhere to go, she parked it in a Wal-Mart parking lot. It is then that she begins to blog about being jobless and homeless.Surprised at the responses she received and the similar stories she read, Brianna finds the courage to become an advocate for the homeless.Young, smart, and resourceful Brianna Karp has given help and hope to countless people. She has also educated many more. Her book includes a discussion guide and a list of resources. She is a special young woman with an important book.

[julyso · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I liked her style of writing. I also enjoyed her story. It was eye opening for me. I did have some problems with some of the decisions she made...buying plane tickets for a boyfriend when you are homeless seems crazy to me. It just drives me crazy when smart women act stupid because of a man...

[bookswithbite · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is one memoir that had me not only mad, but sad through out the whole book! I felt for Brianna right away. I know people have tough life's, but this point in Brianna's life was really difficult. Some of the things she went through really wanted me to slap some people and put them in line. How Ms. Karp manage to keep her head on straight and look forward is only by God's grace. This memoir is down right real and not happy. Some of things she went through was tough to read. Most of the time I was reading this book I had to shut my eyes and count to 10. Literally. I was so upset and angry at the things she went through. As far as a teen reading this, I would not recommend for a younger teen to read this. 18 yrs and older, yes. Some things in this book is too graphic for a young teenager to read. No matter what Ms. Karp went through, she surpassed it. I admired her for that. And it just goes to show that if she can go through all that she went through and come out still strong, you can do that same thing too. Ms. Karp is a great inspiration. She was beaten down, lied too, abused and mistreated, yet she did not let anything or anyone bring her down. To me, no matter if she leaves in a home or not, she made it. And no one can tell her otherwise.

[shelleyraec · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"The review for this is going to be hard to write" is what I wrote immediately after finishing the book. I have had a few days to digest it now but I am still unsure how to address my thoughts.The Girl's Guide to Homelessness is a memoir from twenty something Brianna Karp. Abused and neglected as a child by her bipolar mother, Brianna grew up in a dysfunctional Seventh Adventist family. Despite her truly shocking childhood circumstances, Brianna establishes herself as an independent adult, until redundancy and the current state of the economy, forces her back home to live with her mother and stepfather. Brianna is immediately victimised by her mother until in a nasty confrontation, Brianna is told to leave. With no where to go, Brianna tracks down her recently deceased biological father's trailer and moves into a Walmart carpark with her beloved dog. Starbucks' free WiFi allows her to keep job hunting and unemployment benefits keep her fed but it's a struggle to keep body and soul together in such soul crushing circumstances.Briana Karp is to be commended for highlighting the face of homelessness that people would prefer to ignore. It is far more comfortable to blame homelessness on drug addiction, laziness or mental illness, than a combination of circumstances that could befall anyone, especially in times of global financial stress. For most people living payday to payday the thought is truly terrifying and so to push it away they choose to ignore the issue, and brand the 'homeless' with stereotypes. I have heard the complaints that Briana faced from those I know - wanting to know how do the homeless justify cell phones and laptops but it seems sensible to me that these are tools that in this age are essential for anyone seeking work, just as much as a good suit and access to transport. Brianna reminds us to that each homeless person has individual circumstances that led them to their situation and quite frankly no one is immune.Had the memoir continued to explore these issues and Brianna's struggle to reestablish her life, this would have been a five star book for me. Karp writes with an honest and authentic voice and her tone is confiding rather than preachy. I think her style would particularly appeal to young adults, and she had the potential to become a role model for them.Unfortunately the memoir slowly devolves as Karp's relationship with Matt becomes the focus. Obviously this relationship had a major impact on Brianna and this is her memoir, but the issues of her homelessness are pushed aside in favour of melodrama. The respect I had developed for her slowly ebbed away as she made Matt a priority in her life. Her independence suffered, her determination to improve her situation waned and it was frustrating. I couldn't help but be disappointed in Brianna's decision to buy an expensive first edition book as a gift for Matt, even while I recognise I don't have the right to judge her. There is no doubt her trip to Scotland is heartbreaking and I had sympathy for her, there is no doubt it is a sad story. Personally though this entire drama left me disenchanted with the book, it wasn't what I wanted to know, or what I was expecting given the first half of the book. I almost felt deceived, even if that reaction seems unfair.When I finished the book, I went to browse Brianna's blog but found that in the 18 months since the book's end Brianna has posted very rarely and has made little progress towards stability. I am both saddened and disheartened by that, she seems to be reveling in her status as a 'celebrity' homeless person, her initial goals forgotten. Of course there is still plenty of time for her to find her way. I truly wish Brianna the best and hope she takes full advantage of the opportunities she will get upon publication of this book to create a safe, secure and happy life for herself.I do think The Girl's Guide to Homelessness should be read widely for the message she has about the issues surrounding dispossessed persons and the stereotypes it confronts. Yet I think several might share a similar opinion to mine on the second half of the book, so I recommend it with that caveat. In turns inspiring, heartbreaking and (over)dramatic, The Girl's Guide to Homelessness is compelling and confronting reading.

[twink_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I have to tell you upfront that Brianna Karp's book The Girl's Guide to Homelessness is a memoir. Really. If it was fiction, I would have said that the author was really stretching the bounds of believability. Karp's story is real.Brianna Karp is a third generation Jehovah's Witness. She started working at age 10. She has survived violence, abuse and poverty for most of her life. She had finally made it - a good job, a tiny rental home, a pet (a giant Mastiff) and was finally living the life she had always dreamed of. When the recession hit, she lost her job, ran out of benefits and had trouble finding another job. She was forced to move back in with her mother. (I can't even begin to describe this women - you have to read it yourself) She receives a call and learns that she is the next of kin for the biological father she hasn't seen in 20 years. He's killed himself. His legacy? Brianna inherits a trailer. And that trailer becomes her home when her mother kicks her out. Her new address? The corner of a Walmart parking lot. She's just 23 years old.Karp begins to blog about her experience and it takes off from there. I'm not going to give away any more of her story. It truly is a shake your head unbelievable story.At first I thought the book would be more of an 'insider's' look at being homeless. It is to a certain degree, but it really is about Karp's life. I honestly couldn't book the book down. Her writing is raw and honest. My reactions ran the gamut from anger, shock, sadness and joy as Karp bucks the odds, keeps plugging away and triumphs. I'm sure we haven't heard the last of Brianna Karp - I'll be curious to see where life takes her next. And The Girl's Guide to Homelessness will without question have you rethinking your definition of homeless.

[smmorris_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Girl’s Guide to Homelessness is a memoir of the young author’s life thus far. Hers is a story of abuse, abandonment, rejection, and loneliness, yet despair only rarely fits. She is courageous in the face of pending homelessness and even reaches out to others during this difficult time. Ms. Karp quickly becomes an advocate for homelessness and meets many other people doing the same. One of them is Matt Barnes, a one-time homelessness advocate who also blogged. His site is now gone. Theirs was a whirlwind romance that collided one Christmas day.Ms. Karp’s story is more than a failed romance. She starts her story at the beginning of her memories and takes the reader on a sordid tale of emotional and physical abuse. Raised a Jehovah Witness in a home with a mentally ill, abusive mother, Briana should have become a statistic. The abuse was random and full of rage. Her mother’s religious values were warped and she often dogmatically “ruled” the house. Briana’s younger sister was spared the mother’s wrath. Briana took her sister’s punishments as well as her own. This caused great damage and the two sisters still lack any real relationship.Briana loses her job, money runs out and like so many others in 2008, lost her home. She initially returned to her mother’s home and everyone resumes their previous family roles. One day her mother, full of spiteful rage, accused Briana of all sorts of lies and then throws her out of the house. Briana’s savior of sorts was her absentee father. Years earlier he had killed himself, leaving Briana his worldly possessions, including a camper RV with a truck to tow it. Her home was now located in the far parking lot at a Wal-Mart store, until she moved it to a friend’s ranch. The book goes into great detail of that life, and Briana’s thoughts, has she tried to live the life of a homeless person, blogging it into cyberspace along the way.I found the book interesting, compelling, and heart-breaking. It was also an emotional rollercoaster. Parts of the story angered me, thinking at times that Briana’s story had to be at least partially contrived. She works at Disneyland and drives herself there – at age 12. More outrageous – her mother insisted her daughter work (though mom did not), and taught her to drive because mom was tired of driving her daughter to school and work. Briana took care of schools of Koi at the Disneyland Hotels and performed shows when people gathered around the fish. At age 12, she did this, and not one single soul noticed something was a bit off? Well, there is a lot of things to talk about with this book but the main subject and the one that Briana Karp wants everyone to talk about, is homelessness. When Briana was homeless she lived in her father’s RV (small, cramped, pulled with a truck), until Wal-Mart towed it out of their parking lot (along with several others). Then she lived in a friend’s trailer on the friend’s farm in California. While living there she took a trip to Scotland and became stranded and homeless there, nearly dying in the freezing weather. When found outdoors, the police took her to the hotel she no longer had money for and the owners allowed her to stay “indefinitely.” Months later she returned home and set up house in another trailer on her friend’s property. Briana’s homeless adventures really beg the question, was she ever really homeless? She had a roof over her head every night and a bed to sleep in. The RV stayed in one spot until impounded and then she moved to another trailer and another roof and bed. Purchasing food was not a problem either. She had money most of the time. Briana collected unemployment or worked part-time to make ends meet and save. Much of that savings was used to bring her new Internet friend from Scotland to her RV home in California, round-trip. When he did not return to America, Briana hopped on a plane, last minute, at Christmas to surprise him. It is difficult to call her homeless. Homelessness has been burned into our collective minds to be the bag lady pushing a shopping cart filled with her worldly possessions or a bum lying under a stairwell asleep. Homeless are the people sleeping in mission houses at night, often crowded and often mentally ill. A young woman, living in her inherited truck and trailer, spending extravagant sums on international plane tickets and European trips, does not invoke an image of homelessness. She begs to differ – LOUDLY. I was very torn about this book. If it is true, Briana’s story is compelling and needs to be told. If it is even partly fabricated, I didn’t want any part; reading or reviewing. Conflicted, I checked every cited website and Googled many names. Much of what is in the book is also documented on the Internet, sometimes in several versions and authors. Still, the Internet can be dangerously deceptive as well as a treasure trove of interesting facts. Most troubling was not being able to find the two most important websites in this story. Boyfriend Matt’s is now a parked page for mortgage loans while Briana’s was turned into a sales page for her book. Wouldn’t the publisher have researchers and lawyers fact-checking their fingers to the bone? Would the publisher knowingly print Briana’s story if they couldn’t verify everything?Having been a social worker and knowing much about abuse and homelessness thanks to the profession, I thought Briana led a fantastical life, survived barriers small and large and nearly every form of harm one can imagine. She was forced to work at age 12 and drive. She was mentally and physically abused and though it is only a small mention, Briana states she was sexually abused at least once during those missing years of age 18 to 22. Briana has suffered sudden job loss, the end of unemployment without a new job, nearly dying in freezing weather and homelessness. This is way too much for one person to handle, especially at such a young age, yet handle it she did. After speaking with Briana a couple of times, through email, I believe she wrote the story of her life as she saw it, told a good, compelling story, and has weathered her trials admirably without any major psychological scars. I find that to be a miracle. Whether she experienced homelessness or just a really bad “apartment” (she was paying rent for the RV on the friend’s farm), I suspect will be debated for some time. Regardless, Briana Karp is a strong advocate for the homeless. A position too few undertake.note: received from netgalley, courtesy of the publisher**Since writing this review I have found that Matt Barnes’ website Homeless Tales has been shut down by the server. If it was at Matt’s request or for something mundane such as not paying hosting fees, I do not know. Briana Karp’s website, the book’s namesake, is not a sales page as I stated in the review. The day I visited the site was down for a make-over. It is back up in its entirety and with all posts, looking shiny and new with wonderful colors. My apologies to Ms. Karp

[bibliotropic · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I've had a few friends who, at various points in their lives, have found themselves homeless for one reason or another. So when I saw this book, my curiosity was piqued. It wasn't until around halfway through that I realized I'd already heard about the author, though not extensively. I remember browsing news links one day and hearing about a homeless woman who'd landed an internship with a magazine writer. That was my introduction to Brianna Karp, and my introduction to her was, no doubt, just about identical to thoudands of other experiences, as people read the news and saw a glimpse of this woman.Brianna's story wasn't an easy one to tell, but she does so with a frankness that reminds me sometimes of a person who's seen and been through too much and has just become immune to many of the stresses associated with some of the terrible things that can happen in life. From an abusive upbringing to finding herself homeless to falling in love with a man who turns out to be a total asshat, Brianna seems to have been through a bit of everything. She doesn't flinch away from telling it like it is.This book does a lot to help break down some of the all too common stereotypes associated with the homeless. Let's face it, when most of us think of homeless people, one of the first images that comes to bring is an unshaven guy in a long coat and knit skullcap, or a woman with unkempt hair pushing a shopping cart of her belongings down a street. They're the common face of homelessness because they are very visible, by dint of their being so far outside what we expect people to be and look like. But scratch even a little bit below the surface and what you'll find are young couples living out of their car, guys coming from a day at the office straight into a homeless shelter, and it's not because they drink away their paycheques, but because society is expensive. Think about how much it takes to rent an apartment. First month's rent, damage deposit equal to that, last month's rent in some places. Ad we aren't all lucky enough to get paid $50000 a year. Some of us make less than half that. My roommate makes about one quarter of that.Aside from breaking down stereotypes about homelessness, another theme that runs under this whole book is the value of social networking. Weird though that may sound. But through free (or at least cheap) Internet connections, Brianna made a host of friends who helped her out of tight spots, either financially or emotionally, all because she started a blog and made a few connections to other websites. It may sound trite, but this is a testament to what people can do for one another when they are united by a common thread and pull together in times of need.This isn't a book I'd recommend to everyone. There are depictions of abuse -- emotional, physical, and sexual -- that left me queasy, and there are many parts of this book that I simply couldn't relate to, as I don't place the same emphasis on appearance and social-climbing that many do, especially young women. But given the main theme of the book, those parts that I couldn't relate to are easy to relegate to the back of my mind and overlook. I can do that, but I know far too many people who can't, and I think that sadly, the message of this book would be lost on them.Which makes them, perversely, the very people who ought to read this book and have their preconceptions blows out of the water.I'd recommend giving this one a chance, at least. It's slow going at first, as Brianna spends a good deal of time setting up the backstory of her life before tackling the actual issue of homelessness, but it's still worth the attempt.

[hollyrae_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

well, I have to say I really tried to read this but I only got halfway through. It just didnt keep my interest. It is not a bad read I just couldnt keep interested in it. : (

[blehner_4 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

In times likes these homelessness is something that can happen to everyone so easily that it's downright scary. The Girl's Guide To Homelessness recounts the story of Brianna Karp who found herself in this situation from one day to the next. Being stranded in an old trailer that she was allowed to park on a Walmart parking lot she started to blog about her life as homeless girl, soon trying to alleviate common misconceptions of homelessness.Frankly, this memoir leaves you wishing that it is only fiction, because you'd never want a person to have to live through all of this. In other words, it is brutally honest, touching and shocking, and certainly not for the faint of heart.Split in mainly three big themes, homelessness being one of them, Brianna writes about her highly dysfunctional family and her upbringing as Jehovah's Witness, as well as her relationship with Matt whom she got to knew through blogging. While these three parts obviously interconnect, the result unfortunately feels crude and imbalanced. Even taking into consideration that a memoir will rarely comprise of just one topic in one's life, some parts – especially about Matt – were, in my opinion, blown out of proportion. So, while the content as such moved me deeply, the execution left me somewhat disappointed.In short: A touching memoir not only about homelessness but also about perseverance of “a homeless girl”.