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Jacqueline Mendelson is a native San Franciscan. Her family migrated to the suburbs of the San Mateo Peninsula (Bay Area “bedroom community”), where she lived until she turned 18 years old.

She attended the San Francisco Art Institute after graduating high school. She embraced the Cultural Revolution by living in the Haight Ashbury, hanging out in Golden Gate Park, attending every Fillmore and Avalon Ballroom concert imaginable, and demonstrating against the war in Viet Nam.

Jacqueline “grew up” and established a career that covered a span of more than 30 years as a Senior Executive of several charitable organizations and foundations.

Natural Born Guilt is a coming of age story on fire, offering a glimpse into the life of a young talented, and naughty girl growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area. The author holds nothing back as she tells the funny, passionate tale of a middle-class Jewish family who adopted her sister just months before they found out they were expecting her.

Through the lenses of a natural born child, she takes the reader through her early years, full of rich characters, antics, and secrets, to her young hippie life in the Haight Ashbury, traipsing around with rock stars, poets, artists, and drug dealers. It’s a wild ride during a crazy time, but Mendelson has complete control of the prose throughout, weaving in self-deprecating humor and wise insight.

“Jacqueline Mendelson Presents a memoir of Celebration, Destruction, and Restoration Through the Eyes of a Natural-Born Child

A gripping coming-of-age story that takes you inside the life of a clever but mischievous young girl growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area while also giving you an inside peek into Hippie culture in the 1960s. Jacqueline Mendelson presents, “Natural Born Guilt: My Tragicomedy: Happy to Hippie to Hooked.”

Mendelson recounts the complicated love and ties of her multigenerational family. She also discusses the difficult decisions she made in her life and the consequences of those decisions, as well as her courage and fortitude in changing her life’s course. Jackie openly recounts life in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in the 1960s, which was the epicenter of the Hippie movement beyond tie-dyed outfits and love beads. It’s difficult to read and sense the impending train wreck, but it’ll make readers eager to read the remainder of her story. The book is well-received, with a 5-star rating on Amazon. It was also praised highly by a best-selling author.

David Dalton, a New York Times bestselling author, the founding editor of Rolling Stone Magazine, and the author of 24 books, including biographies of James Dean, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Sid Vicious, and Andy Warhol, reviewed “Natural Born Guilt.” Dalton comments in his review:

The relentless narrative drive pulls you into her hair-raising experiences with such immediacy you are breathlessly transported right into the middle of endless risky business. Her vulnerability is both alarming and endearing and her ability to laugh at the ongoing crazy dilemmas she finds herself in is what makes this book not just a cautionary tale but turns the deeper hurts she experiences into unexpected self-reflection. “Natural Born Guilt” is unputdownable, especially the last four chapters which read like a Scorsese action movie. The whole idea of a “nice Jewish girl” getting into deeper and deeper trouble leaves the reader holding their breath as to what could possibly happen next.”

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