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| Lars Eighner | |
Lars Eighner, "who vividly recounted his experiences with being homeless in Travels with Lizbeth:Three Years on the Road and on the Streets, a book widely regarded as one of the finest memoirs of recent decades," died December 23, the New York Times reported. He was 73. Dori Weintraub, v-p of publicity at St. Martin's Press, which published Travels with Lizbeth in 1993, said St. Martin's had learned of the death only recently.
Eighner had been working as an attendant at what he called "the state lunatic asylum" in Austin, Tex., and occasionally selling erotic stories to gay magazines when, as he put it in his book, he resigned his job "under threat of being fired" and fell on hard times. Travels With Lizbeth recounts the roughly three years Eighner and his dog spent homeless, beginning in the late 1980s, hitchhiking and finding meals where he could, including in other people's garbage.
His essay, "On Dumpster Diving," was published by the Threepenny Review in 1991. The essay, which has often been anthologized, garnered considerable attention and led to the publication of his memoir. Eighner "wrote the book in fits and starts, often working on a portable typewriter at a gay bar. Later, with an editor's help, he pared down his original unwieldy manuscript," the Times noted.
By the time the book was published, Eighner "did indeed have a roof over his head again, but by 1996 he had lapsed back into homelessness for a time. At his death he and his husband, Cliff Hexamer, lived on a shoestring, sometimes seeking help on GoFundMe," the Times wrote, adding that a comic novel he wrote in the 1980s, Pawn to Queen Four, and an essay collection, Gay Cosmos, were published in 1995, after which "his literary output dried up."
"I knew from the beginning that the book was sui generis," Eighner wrote in an afterword to a 2013 edition of Travels with Lizbeth, "and I have no argument with those who prefer to call it a fluke. At any rate, unlike someone who gets caught up in being the outsider flavor of the month, I knew this book could not lead to a sequel or a series."
In 2019, a panel of book critics for the Times named Travels With Lizbeth one of the 50 best memoirs of the last 50 years.