Your debut memoir, THE YELLOW HOUSE, is about our universal ties to home, place, and family, told through the lens of your own upbringing in a camelback shotgun house in New Orleans East, where you were born and raised. What first inspired you to write this story?
In a way, I started writing this book the minute I left the yellow house for college in 1997. I was obsessed then with the failing condition of the house, the literal ways in which I felt the house couldn’t contain us, its out-of-the-way geography, situated far from the city center and cut off from the rest of the street. Memories of the house were imprinted on my psyche. The house was, for me, both a source of shame and of immense joy. The place where I felt most and least myself. After the house was demolished in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the story shifted because the house was no longer physically there for me to cast my desire, regret, longing. Since I feel absence more keenly than presence, I wanted to collect the story, the history of the disappeared house. So many family houses were missing from the New Orleans landscape—I wondered what stories those houses would tell. The yellow house was witness to our lives. A depository of sorts. A collective memory bank for me and my eleven siblings. A hard-won accomplishment for my mother, who bought the house in 1961 when she was 19 years old. A lasting symbol even now.