Tricky Business By Ruby Dee Phillipa (Earth Island Books)
Ruby Dee Philippa’s Tricky Business is a brilliant, unfiltered continuation of her vivid portrayal of San Francisco’s early 1980s punk scene. Picking up where Bag of Tricks left off, the book once again places the reader inside a moment in time when chaos, art, rebellion, and self-destruction collided in ways that shaped an entire generation. The book follows familiar faces, Val, Sophie, Amy, Babs, Annie, Carla, Marco, and The Shits, as they navigate the clubs, basements, alleys, and cheap apartments. Each chapter feels experienced to the max, drawn deep from the memory. Philippa’s writing carries the quickness of someone who was there, who understood what punk meant to the young and restless of San Francisco, and not simply music, but identity, rebellion, survival. Her approach is journalistic in its clarity, yet deeply literary in rhythm and tone. She avoids romanticizing the past, instead offering a grounded depiction of the scene’s realities, poverty, addiction, violence, and joy. At the same time, she captures something essential about punk rock’s magnetism, the sense of belonging it gave to people who had never belonged anywhere. Philippa captures San Francisco as a living force, unpredictable, seductive, and sometimes cruel. The fog, the neon signs, the cracked sidewalks, the endless hum of the underground scene, all of it builds an immediate world. You can almost hear the music bleeding through the walls, smell the sweat and beer in the clubs, and feel the exhaustion that follows every late night.
The writing is lean and direct. Philippa has a gift for moderation. She doesn’t overanalyze or overexplain. Her prose moves with confidence, letting the moments speak for themselves. Dialogue feels natural and unforced, reflecting the rhythms of real conversation, clipped, often funny, occasionally brutal. Her characters are not romanticized antiheroes, because they are simply people, young and desperate, chasing meaning in a city that embraces and devours them. Philippa doesn’t judge or excuse her characters, but she undoubtedly observes them, resulting in an intimacy that few writers achieve over their writing careers. When her characters stumble or collapse, the reader feels the weight of those moments, not because they’re dramatized, but because they’re written with honesty. As a follow-up to Bag of Tricks, Tricky Business feels sharper, more cohesive, and more confident. Philippa expands her scope without losing any focus. The stories are interconnected yet distinct, unified by tone and place rather than plot. The continuity between the two volumes lies in her steady, unsentimental, and deeply human voice. In this book, she also blends personal memory with cultural history. Philippa doesn’t set out to document a scene, but recreates it from the inside, resulting in a piece of literature that could also serve as a historical record. For anyone curious about what San Francisco’s punk underground really looked like, beyond myth, beyond aesthetic, Tricky Business provides a rare, authentic window.
Her depiction of the early 1980s punk community is particularly impressive because it avoids cliché. This isn’t the Hollywood version of punk, no stylized rebellion, no performative angst. Philippa’s world is populated by ordinary people living extraordinary, difficult lives, waitresses, squatters, musicians, drifters, held together by music, friendship, and defiance. Punk, in her telling, isn’t about fashion or ideology but about surviving in a world that offers you nothing and still finding beauty amid the wreckage. The structure of the book, a series of interlocking stories, suits the material perfectly. Each chapter reads like a snapshot, a fragment of a larger mosaic. By the end, you feel like you’ve lived through a time and place. The stories bleed into one another, shows blur into hangovers, faces blur into memories. Philippa’s tone throughout is calm, observational, and deeply respectful of her subject. She writes as someone who understands that truth doesn’t need embellishment. Her restraint gives the book a surprising emotional impact. Without resorting to melodrama, she conveys the full range of human experience: joy, exhaustion, anger, longing, confusion. Philippa doesn’t rely on sentimentality to make her point, but she relies on experience. This book arrives like the work of someone who has spent decades reflecting on a past she can neither escape nor entirely explain, and has finally found the words to tell it honestly.
Philippa writes about darkness without romanticizing it. The drugs, the violence, the despair, they’re all there, but they’re not the story’s center. The heart of Tricky Business lies in its humanity. These characters are damaged, but they are not broken. They fight, love, hurt, and keep going. There’s dignity in their persistence, even when they fail. It’s also a deeply musical book. Philippa’s prose has rhythm, a pulse that mirrors the energy of punk itself. She captures the physical sensation of sound, the collective rush of being in a room where everything feels possible. It’s not a book about punk, but it’s a book that feels punk, raw, fast, uncompromising, full of life. Ruby Dee Philippa deserves recognition not only as a writer but as a cultural documentarian. Few authors capture subculture with this much accuracy and care. She writes as someone who understands the movement and the human stories beneath it. Tricky Business is a deepening expansion of Bag of Tricks. Philippa refines her voice without losing her edge. It’s the work of a skillful writer who knows exactly what she wants to say and says it with absolute clarity. Tricky Business stands out as an honest, human, real body of work. With this book, Ruby Dee Philippa doesn’t just tell us what San Francisco looked like during the eighties, she makes us feel what it was like to be there. This book is an essential read for anyone who cares about punk, literature, or simply great storytelling. Head to Earth Island Books for more information on ordering.
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