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

"So, Volz’s mother was the main vendor of pot brownies in San Francisco in the 1970s, and into the ’80s. She literally pushed Alia around in a stroller, delivering pot brownies to all the artists and restaurants around the city and at Fisherman’s Wharf. It was a major business. Both parents were involved. They had a special bag for the brownies that had a new picture every week, because the father was an artist. The bags are included in the book. One of them says: “If all the world’s a stage, San Francisco is the cast party.” It’s just this great recreation of that time. There’s another level of the book that’s a social and political history of San Francisco, including the assassination of Harvey Milk, the beginning of Aids , etc. It turns out that these pot brownie vendors were some of the first people to explore the medical uses of marijuana. They were forces in the decriminalisation process as well. We’ve all read a lot of memoirs by people whose parents were drug addicts, or alcoholics, or led wild, unconventional lives, and most of the time it isn’t pretty as far as the parenting goes. But this is not that story at all—the portrait of her parents is sympathetic. Her mother was committed to raising Alia the best way she knew how, in fact she participated in an alternative parenting support group, where they talked about raising their children differently to the older, nuclear family model. Her father was pretty troubled, not exactly the number one all-American Dad, but she doesn’t throw him under the bus either. It’s refreshing. And it’s great to have the Liberian civil war and pot brownies in San Francisco on the same list. Part of our best books of 2021 series."