SWOLLEN APPETITE

A writer revisits her raucous late 20s—a time fueled by the bars, art, and music of early 1990s San Francisco—in this memoir.

“Dear music and alcohol, / You saved my life. / Thank you,” Mello writes in one of the short stanzas of poetry and song lyrics peppered throughout her memoir. An aspiring rock star, Mello escaped a short-lived marriage in San Diego to head to the cooler, artsier, and grittier urban landscape of pre–tech boom 1992 San Francisco. After christening her arrival in the city with a psychedelic mushroom–fueled romp through Buena Vista Park, Mello settled into a life of waitressing, partying, and working on her art between beers and looking for a boyfriend. She describes an exhilarating world of dive bars and live music shows that ran the gamut of early 1990s rock, alternative, and country music (she even got to know her idol, Emmylou Harris, a bit). Through a succession of fascinating friends and lovers, Mello stomped her way across the city, taking in its colorful characters, drug culture, and the AIDS crisis. She would eventually come to terms with the staggering truth that she might be an alcoholic and seek out help, but she always kept the promise of the glittering city in view. Mello’s writing on her recovery feels somewhat light and rushed compared to the first two-thirds of her memoir, which pulses with dizzying energy and raw honesty: “The twinkling lights of the city spoke to me via cosmic braille,” she writes, evoking drunken euphoria. She balances passages like these with the chilling, hard-hitting reality of her poor choices: “In five years of mostly unprotected sex, I got tested once.” Early on in the city, while witnessing a public urination, Mello wondered how she could ever return to the suburbs “after seeing something that unhinged, that magnificent?” Readers will certainly relate to that sentiment after spending time with Mello’s entrancing, off-kilter point of view.

A writer’s love affair with a fascinating city and a frenzied, powerful tour of hedonism and self-destruction.