You returned to New Orleans for a year, during which you conducted extensive interviews with your family. How did those interviews go, and how has your family responded to your writing this book?
Thankfully, my family has some experience being written about—my pieces about them have appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, the New Yorker, and the New York Times Magazine, among others. But it’s never easy, for them or for me. It felt like a transgression to write my family’s history as the youngest in the family. For them, it feels, quite naturally, exposing. We’re lucky. All of my siblings are still alive, but that raises the stakes for me. I needed to tell my story as I lived and experienced it. Ultimately, my family understands the innate power of having their story recorded. But it’s still strange.
In fall 2011, I moved into a rented French Quarter apartment on arguably one of the most mythologized street corners in all of New Orleans—Royal and St. Peter Street—in the vicinity of the St. Louis Cathedral and apartments once belonging to Faulkner and Tennessee Williams. I conducted research daily, in various offices and libraries around the city and in Raceland, Louisiana, where my father was born. I interviewed family members almost daily. Often, to flesh out stories, I asked the same questions of different people, which was a major undertaking, especially in the first movement, “The World Before Me.” For most of those stories, I wasn’t yet born. My siblings were, in a way, telling me the history of who I am.
There were, all told, hundreds of hours of audio interviews, many of them not yet transcribed. At some point, I simply had to stop transcribing and researching and get down to the work of writing the book. The recordings were and still are crucial, especially when it comes to my mother, Ivory Mae. I really wanted her to speak for herself in the book. She is the matriarch of our clan, after all. The audio is precious to her too. Since I began writing this book, both my mothers’ siblings have died.Through the recordings, she can hear them speak again.