Early in Brooke Champagne’s childhood, her Ecuadorian grandmother Lala (half bruja, half santa) strictly circumscribed the girl’s present and future: become beautiful but know precisely when to use it; rationalize in English but love in God’s first language, the superior Spanish; and if you must write, Dios help you, at least make a subject of me. Champagne’s betrayal of these confounding dictates began before they were even spoken, and she soon started both writing and hiding the truth about whom she was becoming.
The hilarious, heartbreaking essays in this collection trace the evolutions of this girlhood of competing languages, ethnicities, aesthetics, politics, and class constraints against the backdrop of a boozy New Orleans upbringing. In these essays, Champagne and members of her family love poorly and hate well, whip and get whipped, pray and curse in two languages, steal from The Man and give to themselves, kiss where it hurts, poke where it hurts worse, and keep and spill each other’s secrets—first face-to-face, then on the page. They believe and doubt and reckon with the stories they tell about themselves and where they come from, finally becoming most human, most alive, in their connections to one another.
Her family stories are somehow simultaneously soulful, comforting, electric, and possibly dangerous—much like her well-studied setting, the city of New Orleans. Her descriptions give the place an alluring sense of magical realism, which she then balances with a deadpan sense of observational and self-deprecating humor. . . . A compelling collection that explores a unique life from many angles.
—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
A memoir as thoughtful as it is creative, Nola Face would be an excellent choice for readers in love with the craft of writing.
—Elena Bellaart, Independent Book Review
Brooke Champagne is extraordinarily candid about her own history. . . . That rough childhood has given her a body of material, obviously, but also a pretty tough attitude. No subjects are off-limits, from the literarily theoretical to her discussion of the uses of obscenity in everyday life.
—Don Noble, Tuscaloosa News
Nola Face is unsparing, funny, and empathic all at once. There is so much vitality, humor, empathy, misery, and passion here! Brooke Champagne is the Mary Karr of her time. What’s more (and what could be more?) this is going to be a rich new addition to the New Orleans canon. This is a marvelous and timely book.
—Andrei Codrescu, author of New Orleans, Mon Amour
In her unflinching and witty memoir, Brooke Champagne gets to the bone of it: family, identity, memory, and the complicated ways in which we relate to each other. In prose that is at once humorous, thought provoking, and emotionally challenging, Champagne asks us all to consider who we are, even when we like ourselves least. She shows us the beauty in looking for the truth, the beauty in trying to make a new way for those who come after us, in offering 'a different gift, a different kind of name.'
—Ashley M. Jones, author of Magic City Gospel
There is humor and candor and ardor here—all the doors, actually, opening into the rich, textured, contradictory city of New Orleans that shapes Champagne’s ear and heart. The star of this memoir is Champagne’s abuela, an 'Ecuadorian imp' who takes the author on beignet escapades, teaches her to 'lie in translation,' and to shoplift Smurfette (for starters) from a drugstore. Toward the end, the abuela wants her granddaughter to write her stories—but which versions to tell? Luckily, we get them all. This account of a woman figuring out how to properly value her unusual inheritance is deeply thoughtful and highly entertaining.
—Beth Ann Fennelly, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs
With tragic humor and comedic precision—and with a provisional equanimity she renames as 'bugginess'—Brooke Champagne wades into all her contradictions: white and Latina, Spanish and English, grad school educated and New Orleans WestBank funky, connoisseur of bounce, rap, Schopenhauer and Kenneth Burke, all the complexity of thought and feeling that turns a memoir into an essay. If the unexamined life is not worth living—as Socrates said—surely the examined life Brooke Champagne shares in
Nola Face is a life worth reading.
—Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Jew in the Lotus and The History of Last Night’s Dream
This memoir in essays is truly a showcase of [Champagne’s] talents as an essayist – one who asks questions that breed sometimes uncomfortable, but always enlightening and often surprising answers. Or they inspire more questions, and more after that – a hall of mirrors of questions.
—Ann Beman, The Museum of Americana
The memoir Nola Face, by Brooke Champagne, is a celebration of intersectionality. Despite the subtitle of “A Latina’s Life in the Big Easy,” Champagne parades through the multiple masks she and her city of New Orleans wear, while tossing her insights and insecurities at readers like so many trinkets. Memoirs are vulnerable and intimate. But few have the distinct flavor of this one – ya heard me?
—Toby LeBlanc, Southern Review of Books
