I bought a variety of books on the first leg of the trip, partly to flesh out my research because I want to develop this blog into a full-fledged travel memoir, and partly because I’m me and that’s what I do, and books are among my favorite souvenirs of places I’ve gone.
With some trepidation, I bought a couple of books about Hurricane Katrina when I was in New Orleans. I say “with some trepidation,” because I remember how awful it was during and after the levee failures; I remember being glued to nola.com and talking to a coworker from Metairie and reading blogs from people in the area. It was grim and unremitting and after things were a little better, I stopped paying attention to news of any sort for several months because I was wiped out. And since then, I’ve become somewhat self-protective; I try to stay informed, but I also avoid news stories that are unmitigatedly bleak, that will tangle up in the threads of my brain and replay themselves obsessively and catapult me into despair. So I wasn’t sure whether revisiting Katrina and its aftermath would be wise.
All that to say that I just finished one of the books, The House on First Street by Julia Reed. And I found it depressing, but not for the reasons I’d expected.
Basically, Reed and her new husband bought a house in the Garden District, spent a year renovating it, and moved in six weeks before Katrina hit, although the copy on the back says four. Speaking of the copy on the back, I bought the book knowing only that Reed is a reporter. I didn’t know that she’s also a rich girl from the Mississippi Delta and that she would name-drop relentlessly through the entire book–both of which made me far less sympathetic to her. (Drinking game: Take a shot every time she introduces a new person with the description “my good friend and brilliant painter/ writer/ artist/ restaurateur/ fill in the blank.” Be sure to stop before you get alcohol poisoning.)
I’m betraying my own prejudices and judgments, of course, but I found her difficult to relate to. Before Katrina even hit, her excesses with the house renovation had me angry and depressed. Imported marble from Tuscany? Blocks of blue slate from Pennsylvania? A liveoak tree so large they had to shut down the street to transplant it? It must be nice to have that kind of money to throw around; wish I had a little. She really lost me when she mentioned spending “literally hundreds of hours” choosing the perfect doorknobs. Doorknobs!
This isn’t to say she’s a bad or insensitive person. She buys huge amounts of food for the National Guard troops occupying the city in Katrina’s wake (as a journalist, she was able to get back in before most people). She provides financial and moral support to her housekeeper, the woman’s family, and her crack-addicted general factotum. She offers incisive critiques of local politicians, as well as lively anecdotes from her time covering the campaign of former governor (and current federal prisoner) Edwin Edwards. But when she glibly mentions writing a $400 check each year so she can ride with “the oldest and most prestigious” all-female Mardi Gras krewe, it’s a stunning reminder that this person operates in an entirely different milieu than any in which I’ve ever moved–or, frankly, would ever want to.
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