Last Home on the Left

Set in an iconic mission on LA’s skid row, an intimate memoir about a counselor’s fourteen-year quest to bring unsheltered men—and herself—to a sense of home.

In 2008, Laurie Collister gets a job on LA’s skid row, the nation’s homeless capital. From a tiny, ground-floor office in a mission, she counsels unsheltered men from all walks of life: long-term pimps, professional musicians, street thugs, and graduates of top law schools. She attempts to guide each to their place in the world, to their own version of home. Multiple obstacles stand in her way—the Great Recession, funding cuts, increasing violence, the COVID pandemic, and her colleagues’ treatment of her as an outsider (“You’re nothin’ but a normie”)—but through it all, Laurie perseveres.

Insightful and unflinching, Last Home on the Left is Laurie’s story of learning what home means—and what it takes to get there, not just for her clients but also for herself.