UNSHELTERED LOVE

A New Yorker connects with her unhoused neighbors in this memoir.

Medford-Rosow’s story of developing meaningful personal relationships with houseless people who spent their days near her Manhattan home is effectively a 2020 time capsule. It recounts the changes that Covid-19 brought to New York City and offers a humane account of the realities that people without housing face. The sudden shutdown of many local businesses in March 2020 meant that local panhandlers had few donors, so Medford-Rosow and her husband, Joel, began taking daily walks through their neighborhood, first offering people dollar bills and then homemade sandwiches. Over time, they developed close relationships with several people, got to know their stories, and supported them as they tried to move into sheltered housing. Medford-Rosow connected most deeply with a woman who served as this book’s developmental editor and contributed short essays to the text under the pseudonym Maggie Wright; in them, she writes about the same events as the author but from her own perspective. In these pages, Medford-Rosow writes about emotional moments with an admirable lack of sentimentality. Throughout, she takes pains not to portray herself and Joel as heroic—for instance, she still worries that the city’s plan to use nearby hotels as shelters will hurt local property values—and she offers no broad policy recommendations. Instead, Maggie’s personal journey, with its many setbacks and successes, serves as the book’s core, and it’s an effective one; her middle-class background and struggles with addiction are likely to resonate with many readers. The book also does an effective job of evoking the uncertainty of the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, from the initial assumptions that offices would only be closed briefly to phases of reopening to premature claims of victory as the first wave receded.

A focused and engaging remembrance of a specific community changed by the Covid-19 pandemic.