Personal Space: Alia Volz’s Writing Helped Her Family Heal

This is Personal Space: The Memoir Show, with Sari Botton. On this episode, Sari talks with Alia Volz, the author of reported, historical memoir, Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco — about being raised by colorful hippie parents who ran an illegal pot-brownie business in the ’70s and ’80s. Volz talks about hippie childhoods, the difficulty in writing about family, and the world not being ready for her book 12 years ago when she started writing it. Please purchase Home Baked from your local bookstore, or through Bookshop. 

From the episode:

Sari Botton: You go into some really difficult things about your parents…. I wonder how they felt about you revealing so much about them?

Alia Volz: With my mom it was easy. We talk every day, we’ve never had much space between us… I can ask her personal questions and she’ll answer them. I think she’s honored and excited by this. With my dad it’s more complicated. He’s a very complex character, a complex person! But we’d been estranged for quite some years when I started this project.

It took me working up some nerve to even approach him for these interviews we did, and when I finally did, he was so forthcoming and so brave in talking about these very difficult transformations he went through in terms of his sexuality—he was so brave and open about it that it really healed our relationship. I came out of it with a whole new respect for him… we are very close now. It was an unexpected gift.