Nola Face
by Brooke Champagne
Genre: Memoir / Essays
ISBN: 9780820366531
Print Length: 192 pages
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Reviewed by Elena Bellaart
This memoir explores the contradictions of language with boldness, nuance, and playfulness.
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.
Champagne is a master of the art of the opening sentence. “Three Sacraments,” which recounts the hazardous birth of her younger sister, begins, “I’m nine years old the day my mother dies and comes back to life and, if I ever believed at all, it’s the day I gave up on Christ.” In a story that considers the author’s complicated relationship with her father and some of his relationships with women—among them the eponymous Chicken Lady—“What I Know About Chicken Lady” opens with, “Once, days or hours after a woman had died in her apartment on Tchoupitoulas, the Chicken Lady gently tore the yellow police tape of the door’s threshold and led my father inside without a word about it.” These deft opening lines draw the reader in to each new essay, in search of elaboration, explanation, and another thrilling turn of phrase.
It’s not only the opening lines that delight in this collection. Long, complex sentences stuffed with recollections and reconsiderations abound in Nola Face. These complicated sentences sometimes feel a bit unwieldy, but at their best, they read like pirouettes, swinging the reader through a remarkable range of images, ideas, and linguistic moves to land with grace.
“Push,” the story of the birth of Champagne’s first child, begins with one long sentence twisting through the memory for nearly a full page; it’s a mix of recollection, asides, imagery, and exclamation, a reflection of the complicated and contradictory nature of thought itself. On the level of syntax, the collection continually calls our attention to the tension between narrative—the orderly presentation of events for interpretation—and memory, with its half-truths and imprecisions.
Champagne’s relationship with her grandmother Lala looms large in the collection, as does her childhood at the intersection of Spanish and English. In “Lying in Translation,” Champagne recalls shopping with Lala as a child. Lala, prone to making rude comments about shopkeepers and other strangers in Spanish, often put young Brooke in the position to fabricate a polite English translation on the fly.
During a period of emotional distance from her mother and grandmother after her sister’s birth, Champagne recalls shifting into more frequent use of English, which “required a sort of double-translation, meaning I had to translate Lala’s words and deeds not only to others, but to myself.” The act of translating experience in memoir is yet another refraction of language that makes any kind of objective truth feel impossible: “Translating these memories and Lala’s actions back into English now—back to you—becomes then a triple-translation, diced up by time, language, and memory, so no matter how honest I try to be, it feels false.”
The challenge of representing the complicated figure of Lala is one of the memoir’s frequent refrains, and her role in the author’s life is a fraught one. As an adult, Champagne still wrestles with how to characterize Lala—as loving or spiteful, playful or frightening, abuser or abused, caring or cruel (those sensitive to discussions of child abuse should take care, though the topic is handled thoughtfully). It is a strength of the collection that it repeatedly resists the narrative temptation of clearly-drawn conclusions, insisting instead on the challenge and nuance of holding multiple truths together at once.
A memoir as thoughtful as it is creative, Nola Face would be an excellent choice for readers in love with the craft of writing.
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