On art, criticism, and my drowned house
Gazing at Central Park from the twentieth floor of a midtown Manhattan skyscraper, I wondered what it would look like if New York City flooded. It was the end of August in 2005, and I worked as an editorial assistant at perhaps the most esteemed literary publishing house in the country. I was twenty-seven, living with three roommates, and sharing one bathroom in Brooklyn when my family home was flooded and destroyed thanks to three separate levee failures that immediately followed Hurricane Katrina. How was such a thing possible? I strained to imagine the busy streets below coursing with water. Life carried on in New York, but ten feet of water sat on my New Orleans street for weeks upon weeks—seven of which festered in the house I’d grown up in. I would never truly go home again.
I didn’t return to New Orleans for another four months. When I did, what I saw hushed me. The neighborhood was coated in a patina of gray mud. Sunflowers grew wild thanks to overturned bird feeders. They offered the only vivid color for blocks upon blocks. In my backyard, toxic tomatoes grew from overturned compost. A consummate correspondent, I had kept boxes of letters in my childhood bedroom for safe keeping. Freed by the water that filled my room, upending dolls from my bed and books from shelves, my letters papered my bedroom walls. I could recognize my college friend Helene’s handwriting anywhere, even tattooed on the walls and blurred after four months baking with mold and mites. …
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