Dateline — Berkeley

Popular new book on homelessness blurs the line between fact and fiction

The lines in Stephen Mecklin’s face are carved deep. When he smiles, which is often, they outline his piercing blue eyes with impressive arcs. Judging from his gray hair, clipped speech, and stooped posture, one would guess that Mecklin is fast approaching retirement age. But appearances can be deceiving.

At 32, Mecklin is relatively young for a best-selling author, but close to the average age for Americans who are homeless. A self-described “veteran of the streets,” Mecklin says he ran away from his home in Missouri when he was 16 and spent the next decade traveling through northern California, camping under freeway overpasses, bathing inside fast-food restaurant bathrooms and foraging through Dumpsters for something to eat.

Throughout these years of extreme poverty, Mecklin continued to write in his journal, a habit he says he began at the age of nine. He made detailed notes of his day-to-day life and even managed to write lengthy reflections on his psychological state. Eventually, Mecklin’s entries filled more than 27 notebooks, which he turned over to a volunteer in a homeless shelter in the spring of 1998.

This counselor was Alex Keith, a recent graduate of Brown University and at the time an acquisitions editor at the Berkeley-based publishing house Ten Speed Press. Keith took the notebooks home and was astonished to discover a highly coherent and sophisticated narrative unfolding on the meticulously handwritten pages. After reading the complete series of 27 spiral-bound volumes, the young editor was convinced that Mecklin’s writings, while fragmentary, constituted a brilliant and quite possibly important literary work.

“It was Norman O. Brown meets James Agee, Henry Miller meets Hannah Arendt,” recalls Keith. The editor subsequently took Mecklin into his own home where together they fashioned the manuscript that would eventually become a best-selling book about the homeless condition.

Within six months, the editor had quit his job at the small Ten Speed and secured from Random House a position for himself and a sizable advance for his no-longer-homeless friend. Mecklin’s autobiographical account of his experiences as a homeless person was released just in time for the 1998 Christmas buying season. Being Nowhere quickly shot to the top of the nonfiction best-seller lists as a result of glowing reviews and powerful word-of-mouth endorsements.

“Being Nowhere, a watershed book, is to the homeless of the 1990s what Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man was to Blacks in the 1950s,” a critic for the Atlantic Monthly went so far as to assert. “Surely destined to become an American classic,” wrote Mitchell Cockatan in the New York Times Book Review.

“Never, not once did I think it would happen” says Mecklin, who today lives in a modest apartment a few miles south of the UC Berkeley campus. “I pinch myself to prove that I’m still me and that this isn’t some dream someone else is having about me.”

That remark, made in an interview last February with the Chicago Sun-Times, has proved to be far more prescient than Mecklin perhaps intended. For as the best-selling author’s personal fame has grown, so have concerns about the authenticity of his first-person account. As it turns out, Mecklin is not the only one looking to prove that he is who he says he is.

A woman identifying herself as the author’s former landlord came forward in March and suggested that for a three-year period in the early 1990s Mecklin lived in a government-subsidized efficiency apartment near Lodi. At least two witnesses have surfaced claiming to have lived in a state-run residential psychiatric facility with Mecklin in 1988. And many of the critics who once offered his book unqualified praise are now urging Random House to reclassify the work as fiction.

“Stephen may have found himself between homes from time to time, but he had a knack for getting into government-funded programs,” intimates Blue Heiland, a social worker at Valencia House, the shelter where Keith discovered Mecklin in 1998. “I’m not saying that everything in the book is a lie, but I’d say Stephen was as delusional as he was brilliant. Still, he’s done a lot to bring attention to the problems of homelessness irregardless of his own status.”

Mecklin, for his part, has refused to comment publicly on the controversy surrounding Being Nowhere saying that the book is “true to itself.” Indeed the public may agree with Mecklin if this month’s brisk sales figures are any indication. “There is no one way to define homelessness,” Mecklin declared last week in a lecture at Stanford University. “Many people must feel as homeless as I have felt or the book wouldn’t be such an unqualified success.”