A Fish Has No Word For Water

Summary

WINNER: 2023 Independent Publisher Book Awards GOLD

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

"Superb... Sharp dialogue, incisive observations, and polished prose." —BookLife EDITOR'S PICK

Her mother was a hacker-for-hire and drug dealer to Silicon Valley's elite; after everything went wrong she was homeless and alone on San Francisco streets at the age of thirteen. Fleeing her mother's life on the run from a double-crossed cartel and fresh out of witness protection, she joined Silicon Valley's children foraging food from San Francisco's trash cans and sleeping in abandoned cars -- while tech's earliest generations of workers partied, broke laws, and spat on homeless kids begging for spare change under the glow of tech's latest creations.

A Fish Has No Word For Water is a memoir about what it's really like for homeless kids, the strength of chosen family, and a hard love letter to San Francisco.

This memoir of survival unflinchingly shows Silicon Valley's children begging in the shadows of tech's shining towers, the surprising care circles formed by adults in San Francisco's LGBTQ community, and a city that is a mosaic of technologies and peoples that should not be together, but are. It upends stereotypes about children who survive abuse, young sex workers, LGBTQ youth, resilience in the face of immense grief and trauma, and how communities form to overcome some of the deadliest forms of discrimination. It reveals to readers that there was never a case for tech's shine in the first place.

Most of all, it is a story of tremendous resilience and how we can remake trauma into an invitation to be part of a larger world.