07/10/2023
All that Violet Blue wants for herself is a clean place to stay, a hot meal, a high school education…and to get away from her mentally ill, abusive mother and the drug cartels she double crossed. That’s only part of the story. In the superb A Fish Has No Word For Water, her highly readable memoir, Blue plunges readers into a life that is both a freewheeling adventure tale and a clear-eyed survey of stories of human wreckage, as she recounts the challenges of survival on the streets of 1980s San Francisco, during the AIDs crisis. Throughout the book she contextualizes her story with illuminating examinations of city history and cultural politics, demonstrating the profound effects of both on hers and other lives on the margins, especially the young people with whom she found community.
A Fish Has No Word for Water is a memoir constantly in motion. As it opens we learn Violet Blue’s mother, a former engineer and hacker turned cocaine dealer, is an erstwhile member of the witness protection program. Violet comes home from school one day, at the age thirteen, and finds her Mother has skipped out. Now homeless, she falls in with a group of punks who help her learn the ways of the streets such as which restaurants will give you food, who to watch out for, and how to find a safe place to sleep. “You gotta decide your rules right away,” she is told by her new friend, Rogue, “and you can never, ever break them.”
There is a stark contrast between learning how to live on the streets and the beautiful Victorian mansions draped in the ever present fog. These contrasts are seen throughout (example: a Jewish Nazi skinhead) and drives home the point that nothing’s for certain and tomorrow is never promised. Sharp dialogue, incisive observations, and polished prose power the book: “Both neighborhoods were broken fables with people dying in the street,” she writes, of the Castro and the Haight.
Takeaway: Superb memoir of a punk’s life on the streets in 1980s San Francisco.
Comparable Titles: Aaron Cometbus’s Despite Everything: A Cometbus Omnibus, Janice Erlbaum’s Girlbomb: A Halfway Homeless Memoir.
Production grades Cover: A- Design and typography: A Illustrations: N/A Editing: A Marketing copy: A
