Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco

by Alia Volz Narrated by Alia Volz

Overview

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR AUTOBIOGRAPHY

A blazingly funny, heartfelt memoir from the daughter of the larger-than-life woman who ran Sticky Fingers Brownies, an underground bakery that distributed thousands of marijuana brownies per month and helped provide medical marijuana to AIDS patients in San Francisco-for fans of Armistead Maupin and Patricia Lockwood

During the '70s in San Francisco, Alia's mother ran the underground Sticky Fingers Brownies, delivering upwards of 10,000 illegal marijuana edibles per month throughout the circus-like atmosphere of a city in the throes of major change. She exchanged psychic readings with Alia's future father, and thereafter had a partner in business and life.

Decades before cannabusiness went mainstream, when marijuana was as illicit as heroin, they ingeniously hid themselves in plain sight, parading through town-and through the scenes and upheavals of the day, from Gay Liberation to the tragedy of the Peoples Temple-in bright and elaborate outfits, the goods wrapped in hand-designed packaging and tucked into Alia's stroller. But the stars were not aligned forever and, after leaving the city and a shoulda-seen-it-coming divorce, Alia and her mom returned to San Francisco in the mid-80s, this time using Sticky Fingers' distribution channels to provide medical marijuana to friends and former customers now suffering the depredations of AIDS.

Exhilarating, laugh-out-loud funny, and heartbreaking, Home Baked celebrates an eccentric and remarkable extended family, taking us through love, loss, and finding home.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

One of Entertainment Weekly's "Books to Read in April"
One of Reader's Digest's “Best Reads From the 2020 Quarantine Book Club”
One of She Reads' "Most Anticipated Memoirs of 2020"
One of Alma's "Favorite Books for Spring 2020"
Included on 7x7's "Spring Reading List: Books by Bay Area Authors"

“The subtitle, ‘My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco’ tells you much of what you need to know in terms of content. But as a portrait of a heroics, innovation, grit, and pot-baking in an epidemic (in this case, the AIDS crisis), it's also strikingly relevant. And beautifully written, too.”
—Entertainment Weekly, “Books to Read in April”

"I devoured this book! Sex, drugs, rock-n-roll, a savvy business woman, a social and medicinal revolution: What’s not to love? This is a story Alia Volz was born to tell."
—Rebecca Skloot, bestselling author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

“Proves sometimes truth is stranger than fiction…[This] heartwarming, sharply witty book details the author’s life as the daughter of an underground baker who mixed up thousands of brownies infused with medical marijuana for AIDS patients in mid-80s San Francisco. It’s a touching story of eccentric families and the unusual bonds that bring people together.”
—Reader’s Digest, “The Best 14 Reads From the 2020 Quarantine Book Club”

"In Home Baked, Alia Volz manages not only to write about her parents with clear-eyed compassion and empathy, she also gives us a rich history of San Francisco in the 1970s and 1980s. As I read, her family and the city came alive for me: every person and street were vivid, complicated, tragic, and beautiful. I loved this engrossing, informative, funny, and heartbreaking book. Volz is a true talent." 
—Edan Lepucki, bestselling author of Woman No. 17, California, and others

"A hilarious, heartfelt, and unforgettable debut. I gobbled it up like a pan of fresh-baked brownies. Having come of age in the Bay Area when the Sticky Fingers operation was at its height, I devoured every last morsel of this evocative and occasionally heartbreaking tale, which is as much a deep dive into San Francisco’s weird and fast-evolving weed scene as it is about Volz’s unforgettable family. 'Eat it, baby!' was the bakery’s motto: for Alia’s wonderful book, I say 'Read it, baby!'"
—Julia Flynn Siler, bestselling author of The White Devil’s Daughters, The House of Mondavi and others
 
"Home Baked is a deeply touching, funny, wise, and magical book. By telling her eye-popping family story and transporting her readers back to the kaleidoscope days of Northern California in the last quarter of the 20th Century, Alia Volz gives us not only an indelible memoir but also an intimate social history of the mom and pop marijuana business and how it revolutionized the world. With Home Baked, Volz joins the colorful parade of writers who have brought 'San Francisco Values' fully to life, including Hunter S. Thompson, Armistead Maupin, Warren Hinckle, Diane di Prima, Richard Brautigan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Dave Eggers and Michelle Tea.
—David Talbot, bestselling author of Season of the Witch and The Devil's Chessboard

"Home Baked hit me with the joy and sting of recognition. Here is a heroine I understand: a bad-ass mom doing legitimate yet illegal work that provided for her daughter, but also shaped a community. This wonderfully written memoir delivers a world of risk and drugs and secrecy alongside heavy batches of love and wit and courage. Alia Volz deftly blends in social context with her coming-of-age story, concocting a fantastic history lesson on everything from marijuana laws to the AIDS crisis to the transformation of San Francisco, where she herself was home-baked. I loved this book, got high off its intoxicating allure; long after I read the last page, I couldn’t come down."
—Bridgett M. Davis, author of The World According To Fannie Davis

"The unheralded story of San Francisco's trailblazing 'Brownie Lady' plays out across more than 20 tumultuous years of the city's often tragic history...[Volz] combines a journalist's eye for detail with a storyteller's sense of humanity to chronicle all the incredible highs and lows, both public and private...The author's firsthand depiction of AIDS and its devastating initial impact on San Francisco's residents rings with epic tragedy. Thankfully, there are plenty of triumphs in the Sticky Fingers saga as well, and Volz herself embodies just one of them. A sometimes-sad yet stirring love letter to San Francisco filled with profundity and pride." 
—Kirkus Reviews

"Volz had been a part of her mother’s special marijuana-brownie business for as long as she could remember...From the turbulent ’70s through the ravages of the AIDS crisis (during which Mer and Alia distributed marijuana to AIDS patients), Volz recounts her mother’s exploits with admiration, along the way tracing how attitudes about cannabis have shifted toward more acceptance."
—Booklist 

"San Francisco native Alia Volz has a helluva story to tell...[Home Baked] tells the story of the author’s family’s rewarding sideline during the 1970s and ’80s, delivering roughly 10,000 cannabis-powered brownies a month—Sticky Fingers Brownies, for those who might remember—to customers around the Bay Area, including those suffering through the early days of the AIDS crisis."
—Good Times, "New Titles from NorCal Authors for Your Reading List"

"The prologue of Home Baked starts with Alia Volz writing about her elementary school participating in D.A.R.E., an anti-drug program started by Nancy Reagan. But, Volz writes, 'We were the people the cop warned my class about.' So sets the stage for her memoir, which tells about how her mom operated Sticky Fingers Brownies — a marijuana edibles business — out of their San Francisco home...Read if you’re into: Jewish moms! Weed! San Francisco! Memoirs! Home Baked has it all."
—Alma, "Favorite Books for Spring 2020"

“Home Baked is a version of a bootstrap story so unusual and crazy-cool it’s hard to look away from, let alone put down...What a coming of age story—in the personal, but also in the larger sense of an era in San Francisco fueled by music, dancing, and being high that evolves into the City Hall murders and the devastation of AIDS. Home Baked kept me up late reading from start to finish.”
—Sheryl Cotleur, Copperfield’s Books
 
“Home Baked is an exhilarating, kaleidoscopic book that—with exceptional writerly skill—captures an era of San Francisco history that impacted the entirety of the United States, both culturally and politically, in the latter decades of the 20th century…[It’s] a beautiful read that narrates an important story and introduces Alia Volz as a writer of extraordinary talent.” 
—Paul Yamazaki, City Lights Bookstore

Kirkus Reviews

2020-01-02
The unheralded story of San Francisco's trailblazing "Brownie Lady" plays out across more than 20 tumultuous years of the city's often tragic history.

Volz's mother, Meridy, and father, Doug, may have been complicated people, attempting to build a family during chaotic times in the Bay Area, but they were especially well suited to create and dispense delicious baked goodies heavily laced with palliative marijuana. By simple virtue of her birth, the author became an "accomplice" in Sticky Fingers Brownies, the family business that at one time was cranking out more than 10,000 brownies per month. The experience of accompanying Meridy on perilous brownie runs throughout the city in the 1970s and '80s, when growing a single marijuana plant was a felony offense in California, made Volz an eyewitness to an unprecedented revolution in American culture that continues to reverberate today. The author combines a journalist's eye for detail with a storyteller's sense of humanity to chronicle all the incredible highs and lows, both public and private. The dissolution of her parents' relationship dovetails with San Francisco's more public trauma, including the Jonestown Massacre, the assassination of Harvey Milk, and the outbreak of AIDS. "Faced with bureaucratic rigidity, people with AIDS broke the law to self-medicate with cannabis," writes Volz. "Dealers became healers." Sticky Fingers may have started off as a goofy piece of psychedelia wrapped up in tight, little squares, but the business soon became indispensable in providing necessary relief for stricken young men who were inexplicably wasting away from a little-understood disease while still only in their 20s and 30s. The author's firsthand depiction of AIDS and its devastating initial impact on San Francisco's residents rings with epic tragedy. Thankfully, there are plenty of triumphs in the Sticky Fingers saga as well, and Volz herself embodies just one of them.

A sometimes-sad yet stirring love letter to San Francisco filled with profundity and pride.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940178626405
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	04/20/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Prologue: On the Barge

When I was nine, my public elementary school participated in a program best known by the slogan, “D.A.R.E. to keep kids off drugs!” It was one of Nancy Reagan’s pet projects, a prong of her Just Say No campaign. One afternoon per week, the entire fourth grade crowded into the cafeteria, where a uniformed policeman lectured us about the perils of narcotics like marijuana. We learned techniques for deflecting peer pressure and identifying and avoiding dealers. And we broke into groups to playact situations. I was careful to follow the program’s script.
      I knew how to keep a secret.
      At home, there were giant black garbage bags of Mendocino shake crammed into the closet of our spare bedroom, along with pounds of fragrant, manicured buds sealed in gallon Ziplocs. My mom had operated Sticky Fingers Brownies—a massive, profoundly illegal marijuana-edibles business—since before I was born. Throughout my infancy, she and her partners distributed upward of ten thousand brownies per month; it was the first known business of its kind to operate at that scale in California. By the age of nine, I was helping my mom bake and individually wrap brownies on weekends. Sometimes I tagged along on deliveries after school.
      We were the people the cop warned my class about.
      By 1987, the year of my first D.A.R.E. lessons, AIDS was ravaging my hometown. People I loved as surrogate aunties and uncles were suffering gruesome, agonizing illnesses. Cannabis eased their Equal parts therapist’s couch, executive boardroom, and ladies’ lounge, the barge was a place for sharing and intimacy. It was also where my mom counted stacks of hundreds and fifties.
      I can still see her enveloped in a miasma of pot smoke, blue-green-amber eyes gleaming with her latest anecdote or an old favorite. And then flopped over on her back, wheezing with laughter and slapping the covers. I remember how the barge trembled with a good punch line, and how steady it felt when you were down and needed reassurance.
      There have been countless barges over the years—from mattresses so well-worn they were permanently imprinted with my mom’s shape to hotel beds that carried us for a night or two. Wherever my mom “gets horizontal” for a heart-to-heart talk with someone she loves, that’s the barge. It’s a state of mind as much as a place.
      That’s where this book began. Sometime around 2007, I started taping my mom’s best stories on a handheld cassette recorder. At first, I was just archiving for myself. But as she unspooled the yarns of Sticky Fingers, I became curious about how her contribution to cannabis history fit into the broader legalization movement and the story of my hometown, even my country. I wanted to understand the historical moment and social pressures that created the secretive world I grew up in. And to know why she risked her freedom—and my safety—to blaze trails in this illegal industry during the drug war.
      To find out, I barged with my godmother and then my dad, both of whom helped build the business. The conversations began with people close to my heart, but the circle soon widened exponentially; it’s the nature of drug dealing to radiate outward. The Sticky Fingers crew guided me to former customers, who brought their friends into the project. Some came to me, and others I had to hunt. Several people have passed away in the years since we talked, leaving me with staticky recordings of their memories. A hollow silence remains in place of the voices of our many friends lost long ago to AIDS.
      Since beginning my recordings, I’ve conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with cannabis farmers, dealers, customers, activists, artists, business owners, city officials, and law enforcement—all of whom were somehow touched by this family-run pot-brownie business. I’ve sought to corroborate their memories with historical records, archival research, and contemporary news sources. All scenes and conversations are re-created with guidance from the original participants. Throughout, I’ve hoped to retain the sweetness of our early conversations. My “interviewing,” if I must call it that, is relaxed and informal, as close to barging as I can manage.
      Before I could spell my own name, I understood that I came from an outlaw family. If I ever revealed what my parents did for a living, I knew that they could go to prison and I could become a ward of the state. Whenever adults asked, I said my folks were professional artists—a true statement, though incomplete.
      As of this writing, California is among eleven states (plus D.C.) to authorize the recreational use of cannabis for adults. Thirty-five states permit varying degrees of medicinal use, and another two states allow controlled preparations of CBD. Only Idaho and Nebraska still practice total prohibition. Marijuana laws are shifting so quickly that the landscape will likely be different by the time this book is printed. This sea change began in my lifetime; it began in my hometown of San Francisco, among my mom’s close friends and associates; it began with a plague and the bravery and determination of those who fought for what their bodies needed.
      The statute of limitations expired on my family’s crimes years ago. The federal government still classifies marijuana as a Schedule 1 narcotic—more tightly controlled than cocaine or pharmaceutical opioids—but no one is going to do time because of this story. I’m writing with the consent and collaboration of those involved.
      I vividly remember my mom dissuading me from taking a “cola” bud the length of my forearm to kindergarten show-and-tell. Now, as I enter my forties, I’m eager to break the silence I grew up with. I can finally bring Mom’s home-baked brownies to share with the rest of class.

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