It is a matter of necessity or a choice freely made; a burdensome condition or a vintage-Polaroid fantasy: to live in a van. During the pandemic, the writer Kristin Dombek was one of many people who found themselves in the position of “vehicular habitation,” as government agencies often call it. The reasons for this were both unique—well outside the core of either social-media triteness orharshest precarity—andcommon, involving the pressures and desires that many Americans share: to live a life of dignity, with “no credit-card debt and a roof over your head.” 

For the May 2026 issue of Harper’s Magazine, Dombek reflected on her six years of working and wandering in a Ford Transit cargo van. The essay defamiliarizes and demythologizes a “lifestyle” we may think we recognize from films or our social-media feeds. While Dombek doesn’t ignore the pretty vistas or the tender encounters with strangers, she does attend, with even greater perceptiveness and care, to the more unsavory and revelatory elements of van-dwelling: “the great loneliness,” “lack of internet,” “living on canned food,” and “what to do with our shit.”

Noah Rawlings: “Night Soil” marks your first major piece of writing in several years. Between 2011 and 2017 you published, among other things, more than a dozen pieces in n+1, reviews in Harper’s and the London Review of Books, and a book with Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Then you took a hiatus. Why? 

Kristin Dombek: I feel like this essay is about the nature of the hiatus. There was something about the way I moved, and how I started making decisions, that was under a lot of pressure. But the thing is, I was writing a lot inside my computer.

Rawlings: You mean the whole time you were working on writing but not publishing it?

Dombek: Yeah. But I was like, “I’m not ever going to write about living in a van,” because of the strangeness of van life—you know, Instagram #VanLife—which to me seemed embarrassing. I hoped it would be a quick work-around after my mother had a stroke in late 2018. Then it was years and it changed me, and not writing from the perspective of living in a vehicle meant not really writing.

Rawlings: Right. Van-dwelling exists on two different poles in the popular imagination: the enviable, hippie-ish, photogenic #VanLife, and then the Nomadland life of struggle, fatigue, but also a kind of freedom. Were you writing againstthese poles? 

Dombek: I do have a pull toward writing about something that’s a capital-T Topic—a googleable Topic—and thennot writing about it. This happened with narcissism while I was writing The Selfishness of Others, for which I was interested inthe syntax of the word “I”in sentences.

With “Night Soil” I am trying to write against putting an epiphany narrative onto a backdrop of real precarity. I was trying not to worry about having an “idea,” and to really get into the physical experience of living in a van—of infrastructure, class and color lines, sacrificial geographies, and climate change—that living in a vehicle puts you right in the middle of. What is the relationship between the desire for nomadic freedom and the violence of the stigma against homelessness, is another question that I was writing into.

Rawlings: The piece opens abstractly, like a parable or a folk tale, with unnamed characters whose location is unknown. There’s the architect and the real estate agent. Later, New York is just “the city.” Hurricane Katrina is “the Storm.” What’s the motive behind these elisions?

Dombek: To write about current events to people who are deadened by the language cycles in the news, right? I’m writing about what blocks us from being able to care or consider people who are right next door. How do you interrupt the regular words? That was pretty deliberate. 

Rawlings: A big current in the piece is the problem of forgetting—nature, one another, the past. But you seem to forget nothing. At least I thought so as your fact-checker. The sources I spoke with quickly confirmed most of your memories. There were even a few details about which a source would say, “I wouldn’t remember something like that, but Kristin definitely would.” 

Dombek: I wasn’t writing toward publishing or anything. I definitely wasn’t writing toward a fact-check. I was like, Oh no. What if I made it all up? And it turned out I didn’t. I did pretty good, right? 

Rawlings: For sure.

Dombek: You facilitated agreement between people about what happened. It was really cool. Especially in a time when we are so distrustful of one another, and our memories are shattered. It feels like such a rare experience these days to be able to say among a certain group of people: “This happened. This is how it happened.” And I think there’s some self-respect for people being able to remember what they’ve gone through.

Rawlings: In the piece, you frequently jump between memories: your childhood, the late 2010s, the pandemic. Where did you actually begin writing from? With your childhood? The architect’s house? Buying the van?

Dombek: That’s a little hard to talk about, because the actual scene it began with is gone. But I kept trying to write from that line, “It has been the defining problem of human civilization, what to do with our shit.” 

Rawlings: The Timothy Morton line.

Dombek: Yeah. B and I were parked upstate beside this stream, with no internet, working. And I had Timothy Morton’s book Hyperobjects in the van, so I started reading it aloud to B. The book just had the best words for our experience. We felt “seen.” 

Hyperobjects are massively distributed objects that we sometimes see, sometimes don’t see, but are in all the time. They’re uncanny. You know, “what are we talking about when we talk about the weather,” all that kind of stuff. We read the whole book in one sitting out loud. Since then, I’ve been trying to get language closer to attuning with hyperobjects.

Rawlings: There’s a passage I really love where you’re talking about encountering other van dwellers in the wild, so to speak. “Though the stories were different,” you write, “they were all about the way seemingly unrelated things—the diagnosis and the president, the Democrats and the weather—felt very related, so much a part of something.” Your own piece formalizes this logic of interrelation through moments of repetition and parallelism. An architect’s home looks like “a house in a magazine.” A beautiful lamp your mom buys likewise looks like it’s “from a house in a magazine.” In childhood, you’re taught to fear “slow-moving” vans. Towards the end of the piece, you watch videos of heroic teenagers tracking ICE agents’ “slow-moving vans.” 

Dombek: I think I’m trying to make a pattern of uncanny repetition, so a reader can maybe feel that sensation in their own lives. It’s a texture. You know, can you get an image or an object to move across and show up in different times and places without doing a sense-making of it? But it’s also a joke. It’s a stand-up pattern. It’s funny.

Rawlings: It’s like what Proust says. “The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument, which he offers the reader so that he may perceive what he never would have seen in himself.” 

Dombek: I was sharing some scenes with friends along the way, and I kept asking them, “Does this make you remember your own time? Are you having your own memories along the way?” 

Because if you’re going to use the “I,” if you’re going to make an “I” story, for me the only reason to do that is if it’s not an “I.” It’s really important to me—can you remember your own life? Can you feel your own feelings reading this? Is there a connection in it?

Everyone on the planet is going through the same things, but everyone is going through entirely different things. Memoir must be over.