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“I ate this book up. A smart, scrappy, complex woman gets seduced by San Francisco and then goes to pieces trying to seduce the city back. Mello digs deep into love, art, longing, aspiration and addiction with plenty of zingy name-drops and scene secrets to keep it bounding along. She knows exactly how to write the story of her life like it’s the story of a lifetime.”
—Beth Lisick, author of Edie on the Green Screen
“OK, so you did some stupid things. And you did some bad things. And made worse choices. OK, but can you write? And yes, Sandra can write. She can really really write.”
—Chuck Prophet
"Sandra Mello perfectly captures that youthful bohemian anxiety and restlessness, before life eventually tumbles into some sort of adulthood. If you lived in 1990s San Francisco, you'll experience PTSD over that era's details: leather jackets, burritos, hangovers, poetry slams, strong coffee, smoke breaks, girls in cowboy boots, musicians, comedians, whiskey, blackouts, unprotected sex, Glide Memorial, love, addiction, and sobriety. It's amazing any of us survived it."
—Jack Boulware
“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.
—Kirkus Review
Listen up.
The Bellyachers recorded a few songs about the five years depicted in Swollen Appetite: We Blamed Nashville, chronicles that ill-fated move. Bottoms Up was my nod to being close to the end of my drinking days, drunk as skunk on the curb outside the Bottom of the Hill. Walking Time soars with my appreciation for Cecil Williams and Glide Memorial Church and Death Valley is the story-song about Brian and I getting married.
Here’s a ‘90s playlist of songs I loved.