Frances Lefkowitz is the author of the new memoir To Have Not, a story of growing up poor in San Francisco in the 1970s, getting a scholarship to an Ivy League college, and discovering what it really means to have and have not. The former Senior Editor of Body+Soul magazine, she now reviews books for Good Housekeeping and works as a freelance writer, editor, and teacher. Her articles, essays, and short stories have appeared in Martha Stewart’s Whole Living, Health, The Sun, Utne Reader, Glimmer Train Stories, Fiction, Poets & Writers, and more. She has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, once for Best American Essays, and was a finalist for a James Beard Foundation food writing award, among other honors. She lives, and surfs, in Northern California.

To Have Not is a wry and tender memoir about coming to terms with a lifetime of feeling poor. Poverty has many guises: a lack of money, of course, but it can also be a lack of love or choice, pleasure or safety, faith or confidence or possibility. Or, as author Frances Lefkowitz says, “you don’t have to be poor to live in poverty, but it helps.” In To Have Not, Frances tells her story of growing up in 1970s San Francisco, trying to escape her upbringing through an Ivy League scholarship, and finally realizing that upward mobility is not all it s cracked up to be: being a Have Not and not having aren’t necessarily the same thing. Crashing headfirst into boundaries of class, race, and sex, Lefkowitz emerges scarred but whole, humor intact. To Have Not speaks to everyone who has ever battled the feeling of being cut off from the world’s abundance, and then settled, eventually, into appreciation for all they do have. As author and NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu says, “Frances Lefkowitz writes with grace, wistfulness, melancholy, and strength. The road to self-knowledge is twisted and arduous, but when it goes through a writer as good as Ms. Lefkowitz, the ride is a delight.” Published October 2010 by MacAdam/Cage, the same publisher who put forth The Time Traveler’s Wife).