Violet Blue's memoir is now out in paperback, so go buy it! It is heartwrenching, infuriating, and really funny. Here's the first page, which hits the ground running:
There are reasons for San Francisco's homeless crisis, but no one remembers what they are.
My mother was a hacker and Stanford engineering graduate. When I was a little girl, she worked as a radio signal jammer for a US government contractor in Silicon Valley. She was single, so she picked up a second job: negotiating the import and sale of cocaine from South America into the San Francisco Bay Area. My mother was a very popular techie and she took me to all the parties. Her clients made sure I had all the games and computer equipment others only dreamed of. I spent my days as a ten-year-old cutting and packaging large amounts of coke and watching my mother and her tech-elite companions unravel, until someone got shot and then everything fell apart.
I began junior high school fresh out of federal witness protection. By my freshman year of high school, I was homeless and alone on the streets of San Francisco.
