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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
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Memoirs

HOME BAKED

Alia Volz

My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco

A delightfully funny and moving memoir of weed, weirdos, and the meaning of family in 1970s San Francisco.

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. Each was devoted to the occult, and they regularly consulted the oracles for information on the police. 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. ALIA VOLZ is a native of San Francisco. Her writing appears in the Best American Essays 2017, the New York Times, Tin House, and elsewhere. She was a fellow of the MacDowell Colony and the Ucross Foundation, runner-up of The Moth's GrandSLAM Championship, and has been featured on the PRX podcast Criminal.

Available products
Book Published 2020-04-20 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Comments

Staff Pick at The Paris Review called it "clear, bright, and beautiful." Read more...

Interview on NPR's FRESH AIR Read more...

Interview in Electric Literature, "What I didn't grasp then was how profoundly the Reagan Administration abandoned the LGBTQ+ community. These beautiful young men were dying horrible deaths by the thousands, and the president refused to discuss it publicly for years - not until 20,000 people had died. Reagan's press secretary mocked journalists for asking questions about a disease that affected "fairies." I was scared as a kid; as an adult, I've become furious." Read more...

Interview on WNYC's Snap Judgement Read more...

...an intensely personal portrait of an unconventional childhood, as well as a rigorously reported account of a kaleidoscopic time in San Francisco history, an era of exuberant highs and pitch-black lows.

Alia Volz's memoir HOME BAKED has been named a National Book Critics Circle Finalist.

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.

TV rights were sold to JJ Abrams' BAD ROBOT.

short review and interview: Alia Volz's Home Baked is both a lively, well-written memoir of an unusual childhood and an insightful cultural history of the Bay Area in the 1970s and '80s - as Kirkus' reviewer puts it, a "love letter to San Francisco filled with profundity and pride."... Read more...