SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
A new novel, "Meet Me In The Garden," tells the story of three Creole sisters from New Orleans and the way their lives unfold in the two decades after World War II. Yes, they were part of the great migration, and yes, they face perilous moments throughout the story because of their race. But overall, this is the story of one of the sisters becoming herself and being able to do so more and more as the years pass. The book was written by Nina LaCour, who joins us now. Welcome.
NINA LACOUR: Thank you so much, Scott. It's a pleasure to be here.
DETROW: Let's start with the main character, Odette Honore. She's the youngest of three sisters. Tell us about her when we first meet her in New Orleans.
LACOUR: So when we first meet Odette, she is with her cousin Delphine. They are in this beautiful New Orleans garden that they have stumbled upon, and it provides them with an escape in which they are able to fully be themselves. They're in their late teens, and each of them has a secret. They both have these forbidden love affairs. Odette is in love with another woman. Delphine is in love with a white, older man. And in this garden, they have the opportunity to imagine lives for themselves that are not aligned with the social expectations and even the laws of their time.
DETROW: And from a few sentences in the acknowledgments and from some of your social media posts, it seems like some of this - at least in broad strokes - some of these storylines were based a little bit on your own family's history.
LACOUR: Yes. So the story that my grandmother liked to tell the most often was a story of her youth in New Orleans. She was taking a walk through a shopping district, and she saw this photographer's portrait studio, and she looked in the window, and she was really taken by the portraits. But the store had a whites only sign displayed in the window, and so she never would have dreamt of walking in. And at that point, the photographer himself appeared in the doorway, and he invited her in to have her portrait taken. She kind of pointed to the whites only sign, and he said, oh, it's not meant for nice Creole girls like you. And so she went into the studio. She had her portrait taken. And then next time she passed the studio, her own portrait was hanging in the window right next to the whites only sign.
And this was just one of many stories that she told me growing up about colorism in her community. And she never used that word. And she was very much a product of her time and culture. I grew up with her combing my hair, which is very straight and fine and telling me how good it was. And it took me many years before I realized that the goodness fit into a paradigm of white supremacy. And so this novel takes my grandmother's story, but it runs with it. In real life, that was the end of the story - her portrait hung in the window. In this case, it leads to a love affair between Delphine and the photographer, and it brings her sort of unwillingly into this life of passing as white.
DETROW: And you bring us into Odette's head so well in the way that when it comes to the passing, as it were, that, you know, she's mostly focused on the fact that she's gay and she's scared to tell anybody. You write about the way that she thinks so hard about what she wants, what would make her happy but then, also, the real fears that she has - that her children would be taken away from her, that she would be even institutionalized. Like, the consequences of being who she is are very severe, and she wrestles with that throughout the whole story in different ways.
LACOUR: Yes. She really does. While I was working on the book, I was very aware that I personally live a life that Odette could only dream of.
DETROW: Yeah.
LACOUR: Like, here I am just going about my everyday life with my wife and our daughter. And meanwhile, in this novel that I'm writing, Odette has to hide this fundamental part of herself. And in the times in the novel that she's really in love, there are these questions that I had to wrestle with, like, what do you do if you can't be with that person, and how do you move through your days in ways that still feel meaningful? It was really sad to be in that place, but artistically, it was actually kind of luxurious to spend so much time in that space of longing in the novel. And some of the most heartbreaking scenes to write were when the people that she loves sense that there's something more to her that she isn't telling them about, and she really longs to tell them. And...
DETROW: And she almost does so many times.
LACOUR: She almost does, yes. And in not doing so, it makes her so lonely. It makes, you know, her so alienated and isolated in this one way, where actually she's surrounded by so much love.
DETROW: It feels like, with both her and Delphine in different ways, a big theme of this book is just, like, the pain that you feel when you're not fully yourself.
LACOUR: Absolutely, yes. And part of the other, like, family origins for the story do have to do with mental illness. I had three ancestors who were institutionalized in what was at the time called the East Louisiana Hospital for the Insane, which is where Odette's father dies in the book. So I had this family history of mental illness and attached to that was an inability to care for children, which becomes a huge - kind of the huge, central plot point of the novel. And dealing with Delphine's mental illness and also just the complications of the time period and how mental illness was treated and also how homosexuality was considered mental illness, as looking at the almost arbitrary nature of, you know, who is so terribly impacted by it that it shapes their life in a way that's really hard to come back from, and who is able to suffer through it and live a life that they want to even despite all of these obstacles.
DETROW: Trying not to give away the final third of the book too much in the way that I ask this, but obviously, we're talking about a lot of, like, pretty heavy topics here, right? And I will admit that as I read the book, sometimes - I really like these characters and I would turn the page anxiously, like, I hope something really terrible doesn't happen to them on the next page. But by and large, everybody in this book is able to grow and improve and get happier. And I'm wondering how you thought about this as an author, how you balance these serious topics with wanting to tell - it seems like you wanted to tell a story with a happy ending.
LACOUR: You know, I did. When I think about my grandparents and their siblings, they had these long, beautiful Los Angeles lives. And as I was working on the novel, I kept thinking that there is so much happening around them, as you just said, and still, they're listening to jazz and they're cooking beautiful food and they're decorating and reupholstering furniture. I wanted to allow them to make lives for themselves that were just beautiful in spite of and because of everything...
DETROW: Yeah.
LACOUR: ...That was happening around them.
DETROW: That is Nina LaCour. Her new novel is "Meet Me In The Garden." Thank you so much.
LACOUR: Thank you so much. It was an absolute pleasure.
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