A FISH HAS NO WORD FOR WATER

Blue presents a memoir of her experience as an unhoused person.

The author, an investigative journalist (for CNET, CBS News, and the Financial Times, among others)and author or editor of 40 previous books, offers her remembrance of growing up unsheltered on the streets of San Francisco. The book is both an individual’s story of surviving on the streets and a look at the conditions that made it possible for someone of her background to end up there. The daughter of a Silicon Valley engineer who was also a drug user, Blue reports that she became one of the casualties of the war on drugs of the Reagan era. This book examines this phenomenon while indicting the government’s neglect of AIDS patients during this period (“when faced with the public health crisis of AIDS, the government used anti-gay prejudice to leave us dying in the streets by the thousands”). The author also criticizes the gentrification and “urban renewal” that made San Francisco so famously unaffordable and precipitated the specter of unhoused people squatting in crumbling Victorian mansions. Blue makes a clear distinction between people like her and voluntary runaways, for whom living on the streets was an adventure they could return from. The book’s very title reflects how the state of homelessness becomes as unremarkable to the unsheltered as water is to a fish—yet it can be incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it. The events Blue describes don’t always connect as a narrative—for example, the author’s traffic accident referenced at the beginning of the book is only seriously addressed much later in the narrative, when its significance may not be as apparent to the reader. Readers should be advised that the book contains many graphic descriptions of violence and deaths. The author’s unsparing style reflects Blues’ investigative journalist background, and the prepared reader should get a lot out of her story.

A gripping account of survival and a condemnation of the conditions that marginalize and endanger the unsheltered.