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Tuesday, June 4, 2024
STARRED Book Review: Nola Face
Nola Face by Brooke Champagne Genre: Memoir / Essays ISBN: 9780820366531 Print Length: 192 pages Publisher: University of Georgia Press Reviewed by Elena Bellaart The essays in Nola Face recount Brooke Champagne's up…
The essays in Nola Face recount Brooke Champagne's upbringing in an Ecuadorian family in New Orleans, her marriage and motherhood, and her path as a writer. But narrating a memory is, we soon learn, never as easy as putting facts on the page.
Instead, the essays in the collection play cleverly with the fallibility of writing itself, never letting the reader forget the way language mediates the relationship between the author penning each essay and the author who lives as a character on the page.
In "Nice Lady," the story of a carjacking is told multiple times, the truth of the interaction unfolding across these iterations as Champagne reckons with the role of her racial identity & her (in)ability to narrate the story truthfully.
In "Exercises," an anecdote about catching her visiting father watching porn in her living room is repeated over and over, each time rehearsed in a new genre. These include apostrophe—"O oft-dropped Dell Inspirion 1520, be the humble receptacle of this truthful tale"—British Gothic, telenovela, drunk, and cross-examination—"as a writer, are you trying to cannibalize him by creating this unique, interesting character?" These essays let the reader behind the curtain, reflecting explicitly on the impossibility of describing an event precisely as it happened without the distorting force of language.
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