Part of the story behind Brooke Champagne’s astonishingly good essay collection, NOLA Face: A Latina’s Life in the Big Easy (UGa Press 2024) is a dog. Well, not just Nola herself, the “brindled, emaciated pit-boxer” that Champagne and her husband adopted after Hurricane Katrina, but moreso her particular expression, born of jealousy and/or inadequacy, when confronting better doggy pedigree. Nola Face, it was dubbed. The thing is, Champagne saw much of herself in this expression. Like Nola, “a canine Medusa who looked into a mirror and turned her own damn self to stone,” Champagne had her own self-doubt, prompting her question, “How would I write a book in which I was a partial subject, when I couldn’t even face myself?”
Combining guts, humor, and a curiosity about the intricacies of family that have shaped her life—that’s how. These candid, sometimes playful, essays are a reckoning of language and memory while Champagne charts who she was versus who she is and wants to be as both a person and a writer.
With an Ecuadorian mother and an American father, Champagne is born into the murky but volatile territory between two cultures and two languages, a theme many other Latina/o writers have explored with less vigor. But, then again, they don’t have Lala, the maternal grandmother-lode of love and influence. And complex writing material. In “Cielito Lindo,” Lala isn’t just anti-English, but also anti-books, which are the center of Champagne’s childhood world, and wants to know why all of Champagne’s are not in Spanish, as are her prayers, thanks to Lala’s insistence. As a child, Champagne believed that Lala’s power was as much witchy as God-like, but she now understands Lala’s control via language was also a gift:
“It’s felt like a betrayal in my writing to translate Lala from Spanish to English, and now I’m thinking about how the translation betrays the younger me, too. In Spanish, I saw my city streets; I learned to yearn, to doubt, and to believe. I learned to love her and to be loved in return, imperfectly, profoundly, with a depth some lonely people—los que sufren—might even pray for.”
Language assumes more context in “Lying in Translation,” in which Champagne remembers being Lala’s English-speaking intermediator when her grandmother made jokes “at the expense of the gringo suckers.” If translating Lala’s words into more gracious ones wasn’t enough of an ethics tutorial for a young girl, there’s now the challenge of translating Lala at large, the sorting of memory and fact to decipher her actions for the reader. Yes, Lala stole from iconic New Orleans stores, but usually it was “any small toy” that Champagne desired.
And Lala’s kissing of Champagne and her youngest sister, Alexa, on “every place, every powdered part” of their bodies seemed to younger Champagne, admittedly jealous of the attention Alexa received, that Lala was “saying te quiero bigger than the universe.” She wanted this affection only for herself, but was it sexual abuse? Lala’s hard life and her good intentions—that indefatigable love—might help explain, but not completely. “I knew Lala better than anyone; I didn’t know her at all. This is my best attempt at translation,” Champagne admits at the essay’s end, a nod to the fact that there can be more than one truth.
Champagne never seeks the truth, the revelation, instead allowing her perspective to shift, seeking what’s real emotionally and what’s not, which is one reason her prose is so lively and surprising. “Push,” for example, is an adrenaline-fueled, one-paragraph, joyfully digressive and poetic rendering of giving birth. “I see what I’d known all along but could pretend wasn’t true when you were inside: we are not one but two. Your role, in this time of pushing, was to leave. Sooner than I could know, your mouth will say it: leave me alone,” Champagne tells her daughter, a prophecy that only someone’s child becoming someone’s mother could provide.
As such, “Don’t You Forget About Me,” finds Champagne confessing that she is still mentally unpacking “You’re Not My Daughter,” a game from her childhood in which her mother, who still isn’t much of a hugger but who would, if needed, “cut a bitch” for Champagne, pretended not to be her mother. In worrying about the adult communication breakdown between them, as she worries will one day be the case with her daughter, Champagne concludes that it is due, in part, to the generational divide. Champagne’s analysis of her dubious place in Generation X feels a bit forced here. Ultimately, however, she says of her mother (and herself):
“Because of her forgetting, I started writing that I hate her, then editing those diary entries to later say that I loved her, and I haven’t stopped writing since. Because of her ‘forgetting,’ I could never forget myself. Her games resulted in what I can only call accidental good parenting. I’m not sure there’s any other kind.”
Good sistering is Champagne’s goal in “Bugginess” as she drives Alexa across the Crescent City Connection bridge to interview for a stripper job. Champagne, who has left New Orleans and her family to become an academic and a writer, returns to confront the grittier culture of the Westbank neighborhood that was part of her upbringing just as she confronts the ways that she and her sister have hurt each other. She thinks of herself as “buggy”—bugginess being about optimism, “about not taking all this shit too seriously, all the while still recognizing it’s shit and even loving the shit a little”—but realizes that she has been using the concept to measure herself against her sister, and that’s not buggy at all. Champagne’s narrative skill at pinging back and forth in time, memory doing its bidding, is particularly noteworthy here.
Other noteworthy essays include “Exercises,” a very funny account, using various writing techniques, from British Gothic to Telenovela, of the night Champagne and her husband came home to find her father masturbating to porn in their living room. And there’s “Bobbit,” a comparison of the famous American castrator to Lala, who (probably) once stuffed a chili pepper up her cheating husband’s behind. From inappropriateness to violence to the fierceness with which her family loves, there’s a propulsive danger lurking throughout Champagne’s collection.
That other kind of danger, of never truly owning yourself, is there, too. Thankfully, though, Champagne stomps it and stomps it hard, with all the New Orleans in her.
It’s no surprise that Nola Face: A Latina’s Life in the Big Easy won numerous awards: Best Indie Book of 2024, Kirkus Reviews, Silver Medalist, Independent Publisher Book Award in Southern Nonfiction; Silver Medalist, North American Book Award in Biography/Memoir Finalist; and the Willie Morris Award for Southern Writing (Nonfiction).
Brooke Champagne
Brooke Champagne was awarded the inaugural William Bradley Prize for the Essay, and her work has been selected as Notable in several editions of the Best American Essays anthology series. She is the recipient of the 2023-2024 Alabama State Council on the Arts Literary Fellowship in Prose. She lives in Tuscaloosa, where she is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing in the MFA Program at the University of Alabama.
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