Swollen Appetite - by Sandra Austin Mello (Paperback)

About the Book

An artist's love affair with San Francisco in the 1990s, pre-tech boom, tells a fascinating and powerful story of hedonism and self-destruction.

Book Synopsis

"Legend had it that if you lived in San Francisco for too long, you'd lose your mind. I lived there from 1992 until 1997, and the legend came true. I found the right place at the right time to fall apart."

SWOLLEN APPETITE is a memoir that spans the five years I spent as a young artist on the cusp of becoming in the fertile and gorgeously messed-up alt-music and comedy scenes of San Francisco. The perspective stays in the 90s, tucked between the dirty sheets of a burgeoning 90s musician who bounces out of bed at noon to prepare for her night shift at the music venue or comedy club.

There is a brief stint in the middle of the Odyssey where a friend and I tried to make a go of it in Nashville. I had connections in the music scene and got a job at the Blue Bird Café, but it ended after only three months. We dropped our first payment for the car we drove in the mailbox as we hightailed it back to San Francisco.

I get sober towards the end of the story. I have shared my recovery story in short form for decades. To flesh out that exceptional time allows me to pay tribute to my struggle and to shine a light on the dim path so many of us travel.

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

Review Quotes

"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 the 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

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.

-Kirkus Review