Customer Reviews

Plenty Enough Suck to Go Around: A Memoir of Floods, Fires, Parades, and Plywood

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

After reading the great review in the Times Picayune here I still wasn't sure that I wanted to read this book because I thought it was going to be depressing. But it was hilarious. I laughed out loud. In honesty, I also got teary at points. I think it's a good book for women who live with their boyfriends who wonder what it would be like if the shXX hit the fan!

This is a good companion book to Dan Baum's "Nine Lives". Some of Wagner's writing is cliched and the voice is still young, a little too breezy-bohemian, even for New Orleans, but the experience she relates rings true, and that is more than I can say for other memoirs.

The only criticism I have is her caricature of people whose neighborhoods did not flood as pampered ingrates. People from "Uptown" have been taking a beating for this for years, post-Katrina. There were horrible consequences other than flood which reverberated through flood-free neighborhoods and they are seldom referenced.

Many of my Uptown neighbors were forced to sell their homes because of either job loss or evacuation debts that went beyond what FEMA covered. It takes only a few months of debt to fall behind on a mortgage, especially if the house had wind damage,lost a roof, windows, doors, got wet, grew mold. Battles with insurance companies became epic, even acquired epic names; some are still going on; some litigations outlived their plaintiffs.

Now I will admit that houses in flood free neighborhoods did sell comparatively quickly in the wake of Katrina and those homeowners whose jobs were secured could find new housing outside of New Orleans and commute. But life in New Orleans is all about neighborhood--about the people living on your block, especially the eccentrics; about nearby shops and restaurants;about the local schools--both good and terrible; about the local churches and the local bars, in tandem. Losing that is like losing your closest friend. People don't want to leave their neighborhoods and relocate--even the flooded and most frangible places. Place is identity in New Orleans. And your identity as a New Orleanian is your life.

One day my next door neighbor and I were watching another neighbor leave and it was gut-wrenching. After the movers left, that woman just stood and looked at her house for a long long time. No amount of hugs or assurances that we'd see her soon, or offers of a bed if she wanted to do an overnight in the city could sweeten her grief. She had lived in that house for 15 years. She had birthed her children in that house with a midwife. During her divorce that house was her only consolation. And now, it wasn't hers anymore--snatched that fast, like a stool kicked out from under her feet. Finally, she turned and gave us a short wave, then got into her car and drove away fast, spun her wheels, like the hounds were after her. Watching her, my next door neighbor said, "Well, if ya can't live in Naw Aw'-lens, ya might as well move to f-king Texas. Or better yet, just die already." And he was right. Living in proximity of the city would be too painful. The suicides I know of second that.

There is another component to post-Katrina Uptown living that doesn't get much attention. After Katrina, contractors began buying and refurbishing houses and selling them to wealthy buyers. Neighborhoods like mine changed color and character in a way not entirely welcome. Taxes went up, and that, coupled with the exorbitant price of homeowner's and flood insurance, forced middle income people out. Rentals went up almost as high as Manhattan's. The 'funk' left the neighborhood and gentility moved in. When we bought our house in 1995, three of the houses on the block were vacant and derelict, including our own. The neighborhood was mixed in ethnicity--working to middle class. We all used everything we had to bloom the block up pretty. And to watch beloved neighbors go, to watch the character of the place changing so radically...sometimes I think that THIS is harder than holding on to nothing and fiercely bringing it back to something.

With the BP spill, New Orleans' viability is again seriously threatened and my husband and I [retired] live in a bewildered state--do we risk it and hold on--or do we go? Our mortgage will finish in four months. I often find myself like that neighbor who was forced to move, standing and just looking at my house, at the porch with its Grecian column, at my window box, at my roses, and I think, Run! Go! Go far away and don't look back or else risk losing your heart, your faith, your will irrecoverably. Just run and don't ever look back...because behind you is..no--was...paradise. It will not come again.

Very few people came away from Katrina undamaged. Everyone, even my dentist, knows of a suicide or of a disproportionate number of deaths amongst acquaintances and friends, sudden cancers, strokes, heart ailments so ravaging that the afflicted did not make the five year mark; and we watch those who did sag now under the stress of the BP catastrophe in the Gulf. We keep telling each other how resilient New Orleans is, that this place, whose very existence relies on its ability to cheat nature, is, by default, miraculous. But it gets harder to hope when the onslaught of grief never ends. In that Wagner is right. There sure is plenty enough suck to go around, even in Uptown New Orleans.

"Save yourself some grief. S*** goes wrong all day. Every day. For over a year. Everything is booby-trapped. That's how it is. We're used to ten things going wrong in a row. You're on number one."

Wagner has an important story to tell. In the aftermath of Katrina, instead of leaving the tragedy and loss, instead of purifying her life of the decay and dissolution that followed, she stays--to replace what was lost, to fix what was broken, to mend what was torn. The memoir of the two years that followed is tragic and heartrending, but necessary for people--like me--who witnessed with distant austerity on the news one more natural disaster plaguing the American coast.

From the fires of Wagner's firsthand accounting of disaster comes the sprouting of new ferns, but not without its travails and traumas. Her memoir evokes the bitter frustration of swimming against the currents of fear, doubt, and denial. With sweat and blood, Wagner and her boyfriend slowly rebuild not only a battered house, but a battered life to restore a New Orleans aura that--though beaten--could not broken. By the faith and perseverance of those not unlike herself--who refused to give up on their little slice of home in a place where the iced coffee is always sweet and crawfish is always on the menu--New Orleans slowly recovers its glory, prestige, and notorious nature as the most fascinating city of cultural diversity in the South.

Reading Cheryl Wagner's heart wrenching and darkly humorous account of recovery-life in post-Katrina New Orleans feels like receiving a muddy shoebox full of candid snapshots in the mail, each with a handwritten note scrawled onto the back detailing the fascinating characters and events that began to repopulate the streets around the house that she and her boyfriend fought desperately to reclaim.

Her writing is personal and reflective as well as charitable and compassionate. Reading this story gave me a glimpse into the heart of New Orleans and why so many fought to revive it and exactly how difficult of a task that has been.

An excellent book.

Wow, this lady needs to get over herself. I was exhausted from the rambling and erratic subject changes very early in this book. I could live the rest of my life without hearing about her dogs' feet again. However, it was on page 34 where she finally lost me: "In New Orleans, people who knew how to live were dying and in Florida the life misers and sapsuckers of this world dragged on and on."

Cheryl Wagner captures eloquently the telling details of life in a hurricane-induced petri dish. I am blown away by her determination even as she's extremely candid about the realities of rebuilding after Katrina. Her writing style is a pleasure to read and her loyalty to the landscape is undeniably honorable. I'd let Cheryl and Jake flop at my house anytime!

This well written, hard-to-put-down book is another of the great post-Katrina true stories by the natives who toughed out the long months after the devastation of the storm and the Third World living conditions after the people started to return before power and the city infrastructure were restored. The author's vivid writing places you right there alongside her in her struggles to help her less fortunate neighbors, to restore her home with salvaged supplies, fight with the inevitable scamming contractors, and try to maintain a tense relationship with her boyfriend. There are also touching moments of joy that illuminate the very nature that makes the people of New Orleans always, no matter what, come back to this magical city.

I read Wagner's tale of three years in the trenches in two days. Could not put it down. Funny and sad. Crazy stuff. I haven't read any books about what it was like on a personal level rebuilding after Katrina, but I can't imagine they get much better than this.

While somewhat neo-hip and whiny for my tastes, she does have a resonant written voice. It is her actual spoken voice that is near unlistenable. How she get's air time to read her stuff is baffling. The nasal dweebiness almost comes through in her writing because I can't forget it. I hate to belittle someone for something like this that, for the most part, can't be helped. But couldn't we get a skilled, pleasant reader to present her stuff on TAL? She is even more grating than Sedaris, and that's saying something.

This rather stilted, juvenile effort is unreadable. It does seem entirely suitable as blog material, and as such would only be inflicted on those who sought it out. The narrative (if it can be called that) is jumpy and shot through with profanity, and not in an interesting way; the author seems to be trying for hip, but washes out as unimaginative. Try the free chapter but don't buy based on the 5 star reviews, probably written by her friends.