They tell me when I was five or six, they asked what I wanted Santa to bring. “A small basement with a light in it,” I said. Now what kind of child is that?

Nietzke has written herself into an interesting position here. she moved to Venice Beach post-divorce simply because California was a point on a map, “the edge of the country” as she sometimes puts it, and thousands of miles from everything she knew and wanted to leave behind. Venice Beach in the ‘90s is reminiscent of Portland (a terrible city I can’t wait to leave) in the here and now. stupid evil liberals craving an emotional creative high rush into a city, gentrify relentlessly, and then villainize the ballooning homeless population made up of people driven out of their homes by the yuppies. Nietzke doesn’t hate homeless people. she does write about them with interiority and humanity, sexuality and sensuality, their personhood relatively intact. and yet she is still an artist capitalizing on the relative security of her vantage point to turn the poverty of others into a way to feel good about herself. her sense of ownership over place is clear, even if she never forgets that she shares that place with others who were there first. she’s processing her grief and loneliness, and at its best Windowlight is sweet and curious in that bold way that only women can write. at its worst, it is sentimental voyeurism that exoticizes homelessness (and, subtly, Blackness). whether or not I agreed with Nietzke (or even liked her 100% of the time) this was a stimulating little piece of autofiction and I’m glad I sought it out. the bar is so low at this point that even reading a book that just takes homeless people seriously as human beings is refreshing.