Claire is a dissatisfied major donor to a Portland homeless charity who sees her contributions going nowhere. Erica is a discontented homeless outreach worker constrained by what she sees as unnecessary rules. They’re on a collision course and the result becomes a village of tiny homes for ten women desperate for safety and a roof over their heads.
In her debut novel, “Not Quite Home,” former Clark County Councilor Temple Lentz dashes through the Portland social justice hopscotch. Stops include chronic homelessness, addiction, lonely homeless camps, city council impasses, NIMBY neighbors, threatening soon-to-be ex-husbands, juvenile court and child protective services.
Lentz braves the whirlwind to sit with the big, unanswerable question: Who do our systems serve? And for the givers, the doers, the helpers, questions circle the pages: What do we get out of the deal? Are we made better by giving?
This sounds like a lot for a novel to take on — and it is. But Lentz, now president and CEO of The Historic Trust, uses a light touch in this fast-paced, character-driven novel. She evokes a solution informed, but not encumbered, by the burdens of bureaucracy and process. Two oddball angels, the philanthropist Claire and the outreach worker Erica, arrive from different directions. Claire’s recently deceased husband brought wealth and a sense of social justice to their marriage. Erica’s cojones come in part from hippy parents and part from her own recovery from addiction. And their agreement to work together is bound entirely by their own self-interests.
The pitiful politics of Portland homelessness, a disjointed public and private effort to help people back into shelter and housing, is a complex web of intentions and disappointments. Lentz sets her novel in this world, then uses the tools of fiction to envision something better. With care and humor, her characters take on the system and work together to get things done.
The storyline is rooted in Lentz’s pragmatic feminism. She shows how women, together, build relationships based on regard and respect and how those relationships result in solutions to a complex problem. Lentz is a careful listener who recognizes respect for the person in the midst of the crisis is an antidote to trauma. In her novel, there’s a constant banter of expression, of reflection, of shared fears, of internal doubts, of jokes and kindness, which shape the book’s characters and conclusion.
Below is a conversation between Lentz and Jason Renaud.
Jason Renaud: Let me know your approach to this novel.
Temple Lentz: The book is about women’s relationships and specifically women’s friendships. How they can support each other in difficult times, and take on big problems together. I wrote the book during the pandemic while I was on the Clark County Council. And there were a lot of people on the street suddenly without services. We were grappling with these issues every day, homelessness and people with nowhere else to go. Having these big problems was something that was front of mind. So that became the issue to be surmounted. Homelessness and women solving big problems together.
Renaud: You have some unveiled criticism of the public health, public homeless service system.
Lentz: It’s a very big and complicated system that is trying to do a lot but has many points of failure. A system with many cracks people fall through isn’t something we can just ignore. I did get to see up close how it both serves and fails. And I think that in order to improve things we need to be able to talk about how it is not working as much as we also talk about how they are working.
Renaud: So is altruism a myth? Is it a privileged fantasy?
Lentz: Many of us like to think that we are giving selflessly but the truth is we all get something out of it. Or we wouldn’t do it. But to be clear, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We simply need to understand that reality. In philanthropy, we talk about, “what does the donor get out of giving.” We need to recognize that there is a transaction at work. Many people give because it makes them feel good. And that’s wonderful. If you feel good because you give, then you’re going to give again. But when you start to get into very large gifts, we need to start to navigate what the giver gets for that giving. And that can get emotionally complicated.
Renaud: This is a novel about women in relationships, solving problems. What do you want the reader to take away from this novel?
Lentz: I hope that they take away a sense of possibility. This is a novel that’s set in the middle of a big, messy, intractable problem. Novels can imagine a different world, a better solution. And although it’s fiction, I don’t think it’s an impossible solution. I personally have found that when women work together very often they find incredible solutions to very difficult problems. And that’s a lot of what you’ll find in this book; a sense of humor, with a diverse cast of characters, and a fast-paced plot that handles difficult subject matter lightly.
It’s a tough task to take on a heavy issue like homelessness and please the reader. So it’s serious but light-hearted. And may introduce some who may not be familiar with the subject area. And to bring a sense of hope that big problems do have big solutions.•
Jason Renaud is the co-founder of the Mental Health Association of Portland, a nonprofit advocacy organization for people experiencing mental health or substance abuse issues and administrator of the Alternative Mobile Services Association, the national trade association of mobile crisis teams and stakeholders.
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This article appears in May 21, 2025.