Bestselling author Jasmin Darznik’s third novel

is a captivating read. Its 333 pages bring to life the heyday of 1920’s San Francisco bohemia as seen through the eyes of legendary photographer Dorothea Lange. Darznik focuses on Lange’s early life and friendships before she was famous. Below is my Q&A with the Bay Area-based writer.

I want to be a photographer and my mother said, you have to have something to fall back on. I didn’t want anything to fall back on. I knew it was dangerous to have something to fall back on.’ Dorothea Lange

What did she mean?

This is based on an actual quote from Lange. I think what she meant is that having a back-up plan can stop you from doing the thing you most want to do. She herself actually did have something to fall back on (she earned a teaching credential), but she dispensed with it quickly to pursue photography. It wasn’t at all prudent, but she essentially created this mindset in which failure was not an option.

How did Lange’s early life as a portrait photographer taking pictures of high society San Franciscans 

prepare her for her later grittier depression-era documentary work?

On the face of it, these two bodies of work seem irreconcilable, but those early years as a portrait photograph honed her technical skills as well as those “soft skills” of establishing rapport with her sitters. During the Depression she shifted her focus to people who’d rarely been considered important enough to be the subject of portraits, but in doing so she was able to draw from her many years of working one-on-one with clients as a portrait photographer.

You have written three books – The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother’s Hidden Life, Song of a Captive Bird about the rebellious, feminist Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad and most recently The Bohemians. All three novels center on real-life women who struggled and fought to overcome societal challenges. Your Iranian family emigrated to the Bay Area when you  were just five, and faced many challenges. Do you think your experience of being an outsider helped you to become a writer?

 Absolutely. Immigration is a profoundly unsettling experience. It trains you to be a “first-class noticer,” which was Saul Bellow’s requirement for a writer. I never feel entirely at home anywhere—except in books and writing. I truly feel that writing saved my life. It’s a place where being an outsider isn’t just tolerated, but useful.

In discussing Song of a Captive Bird, you said, ‘an exemplary life doesn’t have to be a perfect life. An exemplary life is one that blasts open our sense of what is possible.” How would you apply that quote to Dorothea Lange?

Lange made some hard choices. To do the kind of work she did, when she did it and at the caliber she did it, she couldn’t align herself with the demands that have traditionally been placed on women. She was, by her own admission, an imperfect mother. At the same time, her work broke radical ground, and generations of photographers have found their way forward by the path she forged.

Your book has many eerie parallels with today- the Spanish flu was raging, anti-immigrant sentiment, nationalistic fervour, Chinese hate crimes were on the rise, even the roaring twenties could be making a comeback. History seems to be repeating itself. Was it unsettling doing the research for The Bohemians?

It could be unsettling at times, but with respect to anti-immigrant sentiments and hate crimes, it wasn’t surprising. I often think about what Faulker said about the past being neither dead, nor the past. If you are an immigrant or a person of color, there’s never been a time when those stories haven’t been happening.

You can read the rest of my interview with Darznik here at 26, to inspire the love of words.

June, 2021

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I’ve always loved the Junior part because my 90 year-old  uncle was anything but little. At 6’4″ he towered over me and my two sisters Diana and Alexandra.

I think he kept the junior in deference to his father, my grandfather. This was typical of Bill, modest and respectful to the end.

While memorial services are invariably sad, I was inspired by the tributes paid to my uncle. He was a man with a big impact and a low profile, a humble person graced with  good old-fashioned values of service and kindness.

Bill was my late father John’s older brother by two years. (Bill with my father below. Bill is on the right in the first image and on the left in the second)

Bill was a great man by any measure. A hugely successful venture capitalist and pioneer, Bill was Amgen’s founding shareholder in 1980, its first chairman and treasurer, and most of all, said the $124 billion biopharmaceutical company in a letter when my uncle died,

(Bill) was a visionary whose idea it was to launch the biotech company that would become Amgen. Without Bowes, there would be no Amgen.”

Amgen makes  serious drugs for the sickest of patients. One drug Neupogen fights infection in patients undergoing cancer chemotherapy, another deals with severe arthritis, another osteoporosis. Below is a statue of my uncle outside Amgen’s California headquarters.

Bill spent much of his time in his later years giving money away, quietly, thoughtfully and generously via what he called “my little foundation”, otherwise known as the The William K Bowes Jr Foundation, a $400mm philanthropic organisation largely run by the one-man band that was my uncle. Up until a few months ago Bill worked five days a week,  largely reading grant submissions.

Giving money away is harder than making it, Bill said. He wanted to give where he could make a difference.

His main focuses were medical research (UCSF amongst other places), education,  religious harmony (United Religions Initiative) and music. Here is a tribute to Bill produced by the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. In the tribute, Bill says:

Music is pretty fundamental. It’s good for the soul and anything I can do to push that along is just as good as science to me. (The conservatory) takes young people and develops them. It’s venture capital in a different sense.”

At the service I was struck most by  how modest my uncle remained throughout his life. Always a quiet man, (I would usually ramble nervously when I visited him, unaccustomed to the silence. He would interject softly with a succinct, wise word or phrase)

Bill avoided the spotlight. Often he didn’t attend awards ceremonies where he was being honoured, and yet he always made time for family. Whenever I’d visit SF, my uncle would invariably ask,

When are we going to see you?

Family mattered, helping others mattered, treating people with respect mattered, being in the spotlight did not.

Bill had a small office consisting of one long-time assistant who had worked for him for over thirty years. He surprised callers by frequently answering his own phone, or greeting guests at the main front door to his office complex. His  favourite lunchtime meal was the split pea soup from  SF Soup or the street tacos at Rubio’s. Nothing fancy.

I visited his office earlier this week. Upon hearing my surname, the security man  in the lobby of the skyscraper where my uncle worked offered his condolences.

Your uncle was a kind man. Every day that he came in he greeted me with a handshake and a ‘Good Morning John’.

I immediately shook John’s hand and vowed to take time to say hi and smile at those people in my neighbourhood who I see every day.

The stories of my uncle’s impeccable values flooded the service. When he and my father were flying back to Harvard Business School in the 1950’s their prop plane crashed in a field and caught fire. Bill calmly stayed on board until all the other passengers had safely disembarked.

Ute, Bill’s beloved wife of fifty-plus years,  has a restaurant called Ferry Plaza Seafood. Whenever Bill visited he waited patiently at the back of the line to order his lunch. Jumping the queue was not part of his vocabulary. (Ute and my sister Diana below)

Bill and Ute had no household staff. The only man I saw working in their apartment was a masseur who had been jobless on the streets until my aunt and uncle persuaded him to get a job. He did. He trained as a masseur and then had a weekly slot at their apartment on Russian Hill.

William Ketchum Bowes Jr was a giant among men. He will be greatly missed.

February 2017

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Friends and I visited my sister Diana (second from the left above) last month and got really sandy – in a good way. Leave the Dolce wedges and Missoni kaftan at home. It’s time to be a kid again.

Get soaked in a kayak,

chilled to the bone in the Pacific and winded big-time by all the stairs on the Steep Ravine Trail.

Start by renting a car in SF and zipping across the Golden Gate Bridge, eventually getting to the extremely curvy and dramatic Highway 1 to Stinson Beach. Or opt for the equally  gorgeous, more pastoral Panoramic Highway, which splits off from Highway 1.  Both drives take under an hour and get you here…

When I was growing up my family had a house at Stinson and we went “to the beach”  every weekend. My sister Diana now summers there with her family and, while a bit more crowded today, Stinson and the towns nearby still stun me with their natural beauty.

Chill with the seals….

Hike up Steep Ravine and back down the Dipsea Trail loop. Don’t be deceived by the gentle beginning…

Soon, you’ll be climbing amidst a canyon of redwoods, ferns, endless stairs and bridges…

Kayak across the lagoon to hippie town Bolinas,

where the artsy locals shun tourists so much that they took down the road sign to Bolinas. You miss it even if you don’t blink…

Stop in and smile at Smiley’s, which opened its Bolinas doors in 1851 and prides itself on being “the oldest saloon west of the Mississippi”.

We dined on fresh Drake’s Bay Oysters and grilled Red Snapper at the Coast Cafe,

then we kayaked home with the moon lighting the way.

ps My foodie niece Sarah strongly recommends a drive to the nearby Point Reyes Station Farmer’s Market held every Saturday morning 9-1, July through October. Feast on GBD‘s grilled cheese sandwiches (voted “Best Grilled Cheese on the Planet” by Gourmet magazine), hummus from The Hummus Guy (‘addictive pita chips’, niece warns) and Mount Tam cheese is Sarah’s ‘♯1’ from the Cowgirl Creamery spread onto a baguette from Brickmaiden Breads.

Two seconds later Sarah sent me another text: “Don’t forget Stellina in Point Reyes Station, Saltwater in Inverness and Sir and Star in Olema. Oh, and Beth’s Bakery is opening soon in Bolinas.” If anyone is looking to hire a Bay Area food blogger, Sarah’s your gal.

September, 2015

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The old San Francisco  in the 1970’s and ’80’s was a sleepy town with little traffic, a few good restaurants (French and Italian), and Union Square was about the only place to shop. If I told people  that I was from SF, they’d ask me about the gay Castro, or maybe some religious cult or nudist beach. No longer.

Last weekend I was in the Bay Area for my cousin’s wedding. Every time I visit my hometown I get nostalgic. So it was with surprised relief that I rediscovered the Sunset, a part of town that has barely changed over the years.

I visited this forgotten foggy tip of the city on the suggestion of my old college friend Tom (pictured below with my friend Isabelle who came along for the adventure).

We drove out past the avenues with the sunshine behind us and the vast coast ahead. The Sunset is still populated by an interesting mix of surfers and multi-generational, immigrant families. It looked just the same to us.

Seal Rock is still there.

And so are the surfers…

And the weird vegetation that thrives in the Sunset’s cool microclimate.

But if you dig a little deeper there are some interesting new shops and places to eat. Isabelle and I began at Woodshop, a collective of 4 craftsmen where the makers are as easy on the eye as their creations. Here’s Josh Duthie and Luke Bartels, two of the foursome. Josh reinvents old chairs and Luke makes furniture from locally salvaged hardwoods.

Danny Hess (who wasn’t there) makes beautiful custom wood surfboards, skateboards and hand planes for body surfing. The shop isn’t really a retail shop so you need to either bang on the door or book an appointment.

Luke wrote down on a spare piece of wood everything we should see in the neighborhood.  All the action happens on a few streets, namely Noriega and Judah between 45th and 46th streets. Streets are organised alphabetically so navigating is simple.

Trouble Coffee and Coconut Club is  a small, odd coffee shop credited with starting the $4 thick-sliced toast craze that’s been covered by NPR, the New Yorker and the Guardian (i.e. prepare for expensive toast to pop out of London toasters soon).

Journalist John Travois wrote a touching article about Trouble and how he started out cynical but after meeting Trouble’s tattooed, Bipolar founder Guiletta Carrelli – who opened the cafe to save herself – changed his mind.

The brief menu features “Build Your Own Damn House”, which consists of a cappuccino,  a whole coconut and a fat piece of cinnamon toast. No cell phones are allowed in the shoebox-sized spot with its extremely limited menu, space, and seating  (i.e. a piece of driftwood outside.) And yet, people love it.

Mouth-watering cinnamon and peanut-butter slices of toast are stabbed with a butter knife to make the butter drip inside the bread.

Other popular foodie highlights include the crowded Devil’s Teeth where the most popular dish is the Breakfast Sandwich comprised of scrambled eggs, cream cheese and bacon.

Or on a cold foggy day, take refuge in the all-wood Outerlands restaurant. Delicious food and cocktails, says my local on the spot – Tom who loves to surf and lives nearby on Ocean Beach.

No visit to the Sunset is complete without a stop in a surf shop. Check out Mollusk Surf Shop with its handmade boards, art, photography and cool t-shirts.

I like the new San Francisco, but I miss the old one.

May, 2015

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