Background
Joelle Fraser was born in 1966 in San Francisco, California. The daughter of a talented alcoholic hippie writer and surfer Ken Goring, and Carol, Joelle grew up in the drug and music-filled era of the 1960s and '70's in California and Hawaii. She had no bedtime and no boundaries, but she had dads in abundance: Ken, Michael, Mac, Tom, Brad, and Steve, as her mother went from boyfriend to boyfriend, husband to husband. She fell asleep on laps and couches and on piles of coats, and sometimes a dog or another kid slept beside her. Joelle's parents split up around the time of her first birthday, in 1967. Her father, with whom she lived at various points, schooled her in other ways. Joelle, at age 3, sent to the neighborhood store for groceries with a list in her pocket that she's too young to read. She said: "My mother taught me to be independent." At age 4 Joelle Fraser was smoking pot, sipping wine, or drinking beer through a straw. A tow-headed free spirit, she roamed unchaperoned through the hippie-strewn streets of Sausalito, California, in the early '70s, selling her watercolor paintings to strangers. As a teenager, she partied with her father's 21-year-old girlfriend. However, Fraser's parents, as irresponsible and self-involved as they seem to have been, loved her and let her know it. Joelle's father listened to her stories, gave her writing advice, beamed his pride in her wherever they went.