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Plenty Enough Suck to Go Around: A Memoir of Floods, Fires, Parades, and Plywood
The cliche "New Orleans gets into people's blood" happens to be very true—just not always convenient. For Cheryl Wagner, along with her indie-band boyfriend, a few eccentric pals, and two aging basset hounds, abandoning the city she loved wasn't an option.
This is the story of Cheryl's disturbing surprise view from her front porch after she moved back home to find everything she treasured in shambles...and her determined, absurd, and darkly funny three-year journey of trying to piece it all back together.
In the same heartfelt and hilarious voice that has drawn thousands of listeners to her broadcasts on Public Radio International's This American Life, Wagner shares her unique yet universal story of rebuilding a life after it's been flooded, dried, and died...The title comes, as if you can't guess, from those infuriating stories of comparative loss post-Katrina, when those who had lost everything were subjected to the litanies of minor inconvenience by the more fortunate. "Everyone's loss is big to them," Wagner kept telling herself. And so it was. "I was not interested in sifting and weighing suck on a bunch of tiny scales," she continued. "Suck was too hard to quantify. There was plenty enough suck to go around. Sitting around measuring it wasn't going to fix anything."
What makes this story uniquely memorable is Wagner's wise and wisecracking voice, the broken heart beneath the bravado. Working on a survey of gutted/non-gutted buildings, she writes, "By the time you finished hearing people's problems, you wished you were a professional busybody or the mayor or the governor or a city inspector or anyone who could and would actually do something." And who hasn't had that feeling, way back then or as recently as yesterday?
Finally, Wagner and her boyfriend end up with "the dogs, sanity and each other." And we end up with this fine book, with its searing honesty, its gallows humor and its survivor spirit.
240 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
4 people are currently reading
355 people want to read
About the author
Cheryl Wagner
1 book10 followersCheryl Wagner is the author of Plenty Enough Suck to Go Around.
CHERYL WAGNER is a contributor to public radio’s This American Life. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, The Mississippi Review, Five Dials, and has been featured on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s The Current and Definitely Not the Opera. Her cover stories on Hurricane Katrina won awards from the Louisiana Press Association. A Louisiana native, she lives in New Orleans.
CHERYL WAGNER is a contributor to public radio’s This American Life. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, The Mississippi Review, Five Dials, and has been featured on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s The Current and Definitely Not the Opera. Her cover stories on Hurricane Katrina won awards from the Louisiana Press Association. A Louisiana native, she lives in New Orleans.
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November 6, 2010
Every year, Saint Mary's College chooses a text for Freshmen to read, a narrative that unites the incoming class with a common frame of reference, joining students in a shared discovery of learning. This year's pick was Cheryl Wagner's memoir Plenty Enough Suck to Go Around. At the time Wagner wrote her book, our students were thirteen years old. They were familiar with the footage, and they knew Katrina was bad, but Wagner's story turns, what many of us might have experienced as an abstract national crisis, into a visceral and personal campaign of survival and re-building.
For those unfamiliar with the genre, the memoir, self-involved by nature, pulls readers into an intimacy that, often times, can be too close for comfort, especially for eighteen-year-olds who generally have a prescribed aversion to dislike any text they've been assigned to read. Though they grappled with the voice and style, the story stood out and shocked us all.
The hurricane season arrives with autumn raising heightened anxiety for anyone who lives in the Gulf, and, since 2005, this anxiety is multiplied by terrible memories. Tragedy happens everyday but tragedy of this magnitude, when so much of it could be prevented, is a national disgrace. In Wagner's memoir, The Hurricane itself is portrayed in a series of emails, capturing a small sense of the confusion and displacement that wreaked through three states. Wagner focuses on the brutal aftermath, and we shadow her personal recovery in the two years that followed after the initial catastrophe. Even before the storm, Wagner admits she was no optimist: "Injury was injury. I had never met a single person who emerged from a car accident or a house fire fundamentally better off than they were before they went in. I didn't believe in clouds with silver linings. I believed in clouds" (17). Despite her vegetarian, artsy ways, she maintains a pretty cynical outlook, which has sharpened her voice and perspective, giving audiences a particularly poignant lens to view the wake of the storm.
"People's minds are breaking" (32), she writes. "Around the city, there was heartbreaking garbage clotting the interstates. Toys, clothes, mattresses. My eyes could not get used to it" (53), Wagner describes a horrific world and guides us through the utter disbelief that we all feel: how could this happen here in the U.S.? Her voice is gritty and quirky at the same time. She does an excellent job balancing sharp humor with an adept ability to describe what so easily could be blanketed under the general terms of "shameful" and "tragic." Wagner's strength is in her skill to portray the reality without resorting to platitudes. Every frustration, every shock, and every moment of distress is uniquely addressed, and Wagner takes great pains to ensure her story-telling doesn't become repetitive: "I didn't know that you could leave your house one person and return another. That the planets can shift suddenly to make you four or five people all at once, none slightly resembling who you thought you were before. I did not start this summer as a haphazard victim, rescuer, roofer or adventurer" (61). Wagner puts these questions to the test as she scrapes her life together piece by piece: How do we define normalcy and, conversely, how do we act in a crisis or how do we budget stress and learn to take a hit?
Her narrative scrutinizes issues that we take for granted on a daily basis. Having shelter, being able to drink clean water, take a shower, and wear clean clothes, these were daily struggles for her and her fellow neighbors of NOLA. Owning things means being responsible for them, and being a part of a community means you have to take some ownership for your community. Most of the time we can just commute through without stopping to take notice of our surroundings. We're so busy with our lives, rarely do we care who we live next to and what they do, but after Katrina, all of this changed for Wagner and her partner, Jake.
Unlike many of the interviewees in Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke, Wagner and her peers had options, which really kept them afloat. They owned their home, had college degrees, and a place to stay when the storm hit. They could come and go as they pleased though the pull of their home ultimately keeps them rooted. Though her life wasn't as devastated as many of the survivors we've seen in many of the documentaries, Wagner still had her own challenges and difficulties to face, many of which were tinged with a strong sense of survivor's guilt that she may carry with her for the rest of her life.
The most palpable theme that Wagner emphasizes is the idea of home. Its so rare now for us to grow up and stay in the city where we were born. For many of us, this idea seems out-dated, but Wagner, like her mother, is determined to keep to her roots, which is what keeps her and Jake committed in their two-year struggle to rebuild their home. They tear down walls, pile garbage that's strewn everywhere they look, they fight with contractors and FEMA, and protect their property from looters and squatters. Home. Wagner tells us exactly what this word means through every experience she recounts and every sentence she stitches together.
In addition to the assigned reading, Saint Mary's also invites the chosen author to come speak to Freshman classes and share informal discussions with the graduate students in the MFA Creative Writing Program. Wagner visited with our class in the morning and also read for a huge audience of Frosh in the evening. Like her writing, she is sharp as a razor's edge and candid, at least candid enough to tell us from the start that she wouldn't answer questions about the neighborhood, her house, or the people close to her who were covered in the memoir. That book is closed she explained to a disappointed audience. "I don't want my life to become like Jersey Shore," Wagner makes it clear that she wanted to pay respect to the people who allowed her to write her story by giving them their privacy.
Here are some of the tidbits Wagner did share with audiences:
The experience in many ways was so much worse than what I wrote and also so much better. Fear so pervasive, can't drink the water without suspecting what might be in it, can't sleep at night without wondering how someone could break in, or, if they happen to spend an evening away, wondering who might be poking around our property. Constantly measuring, trying to keep things in perspective between big losses and small gains. We had solidarity in misery at times.
Before the memoir, Wagner explained how she had been revising a tragicomedy novel that took place in NOLA before the storm hit, and, afterward, that NOLA wasn't around anymore. The non-fiction was fantastical enough at the time.
Students asked her what NOLA is like today, and Wagner describes:
Another student asked how she managed to write so much tragedy, and Wagner responded, "In what way could I tell people this story and how I could get them to read this? I knew I didn't want to read about disaster or write a disaster story, yet how do you preserve or communicate an important cultural moment and overcome that human aversion to look away. There was an absurdity in this rubblescape, seeing how humans can still act out in a lot of petty dramas." She wanted to capture the legacy of the storm, and Houston/NOLA thing. "The displacement caused a lot of commuting between the two places." She was always meeting waves of new people: "artists, coming and going. Before Katrina, our lives were band stuff, writing stuff, artists' stuff, but after the storm, now, there are these people who have had to rebuild their whole house like us, people who I'll be spending the rest of my life with. What do I have in common with a sixty year-old? But when we're rebuilding a wall or trying to make sure no hobo comes to squat, we now have everything in common."
In her evening talk, Wagner acknowledged the continued engagement SMC has committed over the years including the "Plenty Enough Stuff to Go Around," a school supply drive where pens, paper, and backpacks, etc were distributed in New Orleans. Wagner read towards the conclusion of her book dedicating her passage to Saint Mary's commitment to civic engagement. She also read from an essay on a follow up after the book. Before the Q&A, she shared a film called Mouse Holes from her friend Helen, a video artist. Helen had lost her life to random violence in NOLA, during some of the darker days that followed directly after the storm, which Wagner wrote about in her memoir. The film, a celebration of life, explores where loved ones come from and what happens to them after they leave us. Wagner warned us, the movie was shot on Super 8, "and many of you can probably do higher quality on your laptops now." Mouseholes is now in the Harvard Archives, produced by Peripheral Productions.
During Q&A, one of the graduate students asked Wagner about her craft in which Wagner, replied, "I think in scenes now. In comparing fiction to journalism there is a lot of explication and information in the latter, and the two genres are very different in this aspect." She knew that with her background in journalism she'd "Need to describe in a way that's tactile and scene-based with a little bit of history but try not to bog down the readers with the history." A lot of the book was reconstructed from memory and emails though some of the book was written concurrent with the reconstruction and often used as an exercise of escape. Writing was definitely preferable to being a carpenter's assistant. In regards to writing non-fiction, Wagner talked to the people who she knew she would see again and asked them if they wanted their names changed, and those she knew for sure she'd never see again, she explained how she didn't really bother for permission.
Five years after the footage, the crime and the uproar, Wagner's memoir Plenty Enough Suck to Go Around gives us a chance to zoom in and see the grand scale of catastrophe through a very particular and grounded perspective. The relationship between Jake and Cheryl is amazing in that they've been able to stay together through so much. It's interesting to see the choices she made in revealing who he is since we barely know what he looks like. In the memoir, Wagner expressly leaves out any description of height, clothes, or mannerisms, but we know Jake in the truest sense from what she does leave us on the page. Wagner keeps the memories fresh in honor of those who are still dealing with the catastrophe. There are wounds still bleeding, yet beauty and magic catches us by surprise, just as we're sure Wagner was caught unawares: "Sometimes I tried to picture what my yard had looked like underwater. In the less murky version it was not the pit bull puppy that had paddled up to my friend's dad's canoe. It was a sea garden with sea sprite ladies in old Nola housecoats tumbling on bright strawberry bottlebrush tree anemones. In the sea garden, old century plants were blue squids. A filthy Barbie backstroked" (97).
A student had asked her what kept her going through the re-building process, and she answered: "Visitors couldn't see what we saw. We moved at a snail's pace of progress." But what really pulled her through were the "Random acts of greatness like elderly ladies swooping in and cleaning up the place."
For those unfamiliar with the genre, the memoir, self-involved by nature, pulls readers into an intimacy that, often times, can be too close for comfort, especially for eighteen-year-olds who generally have a prescribed aversion to dislike any text they've been assigned to read. Though they grappled with the voice and style, the story stood out and shocked us all.
The hurricane season arrives with autumn raising heightened anxiety for anyone who lives in the Gulf, and, since 2005, this anxiety is multiplied by terrible memories. Tragedy happens everyday but tragedy of this magnitude, when so much of it could be prevented, is a national disgrace. In Wagner's memoir, The Hurricane itself is portrayed in a series of emails, capturing a small sense of the confusion and displacement that wreaked through three states. Wagner focuses on the brutal aftermath, and we shadow her personal recovery in the two years that followed after the initial catastrophe. Even before the storm, Wagner admits she was no optimist: "Injury was injury. I had never met a single person who emerged from a car accident or a house fire fundamentally better off than they were before they went in. I didn't believe in clouds with silver linings. I believed in clouds" (17). Despite her vegetarian, artsy ways, she maintains a pretty cynical outlook, which has sharpened her voice and perspective, giving audiences a particularly poignant lens to view the wake of the storm.
"People's minds are breaking" (32), she writes. "Around the city, there was heartbreaking garbage clotting the interstates. Toys, clothes, mattresses. My eyes could not get used to it" (53), Wagner describes a horrific world and guides us through the utter disbelief that we all feel: how could this happen here in the U.S.? Her voice is gritty and quirky at the same time. She does an excellent job balancing sharp humor with an adept ability to describe what so easily could be blanketed under the general terms of "shameful" and "tragic." Wagner's strength is in her skill to portray the reality without resorting to platitudes. Every frustration, every shock, and every moment of distress is uniquely addressed, and Wagner takes great pains to ensure her story-telling doesn't become repetitive: "I didn't know that you could leave your house one person and return another. That the planets can shift suddenly to make you four or five people all at once, none slightly resembling who you thought you were before. I did not start this summer as a haphazard victim, rescuer, roofer or adventurer" (61). Wagner puts these questions to the test as she scrapes her life together piece by piece: How do we define normalcy and, conversely, how do we act in a crisis or how do we budget stress and learn to take a hit?
Her narrative scrutinizes issues that we take for granted on a daily basis. Having shelter, being able to drink clean water, take a shower, and wear clean clothes, these were daily struggles for her and her fellow neighbors of NOLA. Owning things means being responsible for them, and being a part of a community means you have to take some ownership for your community. Most of the time we can just commute through without stopping to take notice of our surroundings. We're so busy with our lives, rarely do we care who we live next to and what they do, but after Katrina, all of this changed for Wagner and her partner, Jake.
Unlike many of the interviewees in Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke, Wagner and her peers had options, which really kept them afloat. They owned their home, had college degrees, and a place to stay when the storm hit. They could come and go as they pleased though the pull of their home ultimately keeps them rooted. Though her life wasn't as devastated as many of the survivors we've seen in many of the documentaries, Wagner still had her own challenges and difficulties to face, many of which were tinged with a strong sense of survivor's guilt that she may carry with her for the rest of her life.
The most palpable theme that Wagner emphasizes is the idea of home. Its so rare now for us to grow up and stay in the city where we were born. For many of us, this idea seems out-dated, but Wagner, like her mother, is determined to keep to her roots, which is what keeps her and Jake committed in their two-year struggle to rebuild their home. They tear down walls, pile garbage that's strewn everywhere they look, they fight with contractors and FEMA, and protect their property from looters and squatters. Home. Wagner tells us exactly what this word means through every experience she recounts and every sentence she stitches together.
In addition to the assigned reading, Saint Mary's also invites the chosen author to come speak to Freshman classes and share informal discussions with the graduate students in the MFA Creative Writing Program. Wagner visited with our class in the morning and also read for a huge audience of Frosh in the evening. Like her writing, she is sharp as a razor's edge and candid, at least candid enough to tell us from the start that she wouldn't answer questions about the neighborhood, her house, or the people close to her who were covered in the memoir. That book is closed she explained to a disappointed audience. "I don't want my life to become like Jersey Shore," Wagner makes it clear that she wanted to pay respect to the people who allowed her to write her story by giving them their privacy.
Here are some of the tidbits Wagner did share with audiences:
The experience in many ways was so much worse than what I wrote and also so much better. Fear so pervasive, can't drink the water without suspecting what might be in it, can't sleep at night without wondering how someone could break in, or, if they happen to spend an evening away, wondering who might be poking around our property. Constantly measuring, trying to keep things in perspective between big losses and small gains. We had solidarity in misery at times.
Before the memoir, Wagner explained how she had been revising a tragicomedy novel that took place in NOLA before the storm hit, and, afterward, that NOLA wasn't around anymore. The non-fiction was fantastical enough at the time.
Students asked her what NOLA is like today, and Wagner describes:
75% of the houses are recovered in her neighborhood. In the 9th Ward, 30-50% less recovered. New Orleans still needs to take care of its crumbling infrastructure like aging dams, and a lot of these things can only come from the Federal Government. The crime lab is still not open there. All the levies and canal walls still aren't fixed, so every hurricane season we have to think about it and have a little ambivalence. Try not getting attached to things and not having a lot of stuff. Some think their house is a camp and others have to do a mental trick and believe 'its not gonna happen again.' I try to keep it in the forefront but not obsess about it. Trying to stay flexible into the future. The pyschological, social, and economic cost is greater than people had anticipated. Many friends and colleagues had lost time in their career trajectory. There were articles in the paper that compared us to Japan after their recovery, and they said that recovery takes 8-10 years for rebuilding of infrastructure, but there's the social, cultural and psychological cost. There was that wave when everyone's elderly people were dying. Some people went crazy immediately after, and others who got hit later. You don't know who's going to be resilient. We thought the [mental] snapping would only go on for a certain period of time, but that's not true. There's another wave of snapping.
I haven't seen the Lee documentaries and know a lot of people who don't want to or can't see the images. You kind of pick what you can engage in. I have lost all hope on certain aspects that I don't think it'll ever come back to the numbers we once had in New Orleans though we are geting some modernizations like a bike path and re-thinking the school system, so there's some shaking up. There might be more libertarians, people who are both liberal and conservative but don't trust the government. Weall hope the Saints when again, and we have a general shared mistrust of the government, especially after the BP oil spill.
Another student asked how she managed to write so much tragedy, and Wagner responded, "In what way could I tell people this story and how I could get them to read this? I knew I didn't want to read about disaster or write a disaster story, yet how do you preserve or communicate an important cultural moment and overcome that human aversion to look away. There was an absurdity in this rubblescape, seeing how humans can still act out in a lot of petty dramas." She wanted to capture the legacy of the storm, and Houston/NOLA thing. "The displacement caused a lot of commuting between the two places." She was always meeting waves of new people: "artists, coming and going. Before Katrina, our lives were band stuff, writing stuff, artists' stuff, but after the storm, now, there are these people who have had to rebuild their whole house like us, people who I'll be spending the rest of my life with. What do I have in common with a sixty year-old? But when we're rebuilding a wall or trying to make sure no hobo comes to squat, we now have everything in common."
In her evening talk, Wagner acknowledged the continued engagement SMC has committed over the years including the "Plenty Enough Stuff to Go Around," a school supply drive where pens, paper, and backpacks, etc were distributed in New Orleans. Wagner read towards the conclusion of her book dedicating her passage to Saint Mary's commitment to civic engagement. She also read from an essay on a follow up after the book. Before the Q&A, she shared a film called Mouse Holes from her friend Helen, a video artist. Helen had lost her life to random violence in NOLA, during some of the darker days that followed directly after the storm, which Wagner wrote about in her memoir. The film, a celebration of life, explores where loved ones come from and what happens to them after they leave us. Wagner warned us, the movie was shot on Super 8, "and many of you can probably do higher quality on your laptops now." Mouseholes is now in the Harvard Archives, produced by Peripheral Productions.
During Q&A, one of the graduate students asked Wagner about her craft in which Wagner, replied, "I think in scenes now. In comparing fiction to journalism there is a lot of explication and information in the latter, and the two genres are very different in this aspect." She knew that with her background in journalism she'd "Need to describe in a way that's tactile and scene-based with a little bit of history but try not to bog down the readers with the history." A lot of the book was reconstructed from memory and emails though some of the book was written concurrent with the reconstruction and often used as an exercise of escape. Writing was definitely preferable to being a carpenter's assistant. In regards to writing non-fiction, Wagner talked to the people who she knew she would see again and asked them if they wanted their names changed, and those she knew for sure she'd never see again, she explained how she didn't really bother for permission.
Five years after the footage, the crime and the uproar, Wagner's memoir Plenty Enough Suck to Go Around gives us a chance to zoom in and see the grand scale of catastrophe through a very particular and grounded perspective. The relationship between Jake and Cheryl is amazing in that they've been able to stay together through so much. It's interesting to see the choices she made in revealing who he is since we barely know what he looks like. In the memoir, Wagner expressly leaves out any description of height, clothes, or mannerisms, but we know Jake in the truest sense from what she does leave us on the page. Wagner keeps the memories fresh in honor of those who are still dealing with the catastrophe. There are wounds still bleeding, yet beauty and magic catches us by surprise, just as we're sure Wagner was caught unawares: "Sometimes I tried to picture what my yard had looked like underwater. In the less murky version it was not the pit bull puppy that had paddled up to my friend's dad's canoe. It was a sea garden with sea sprite ladies in old Nola housecoats tumbling on bright strawberry bottlebrush tree anemones. In the sea garden, old century plants were blue squids. A filthy Barbie backstroked" (97).
A student had asked her what kept her going through the re-building process, and she answered: "Visitors couldn't see what we saw. We moved at a snail's pace of progress." But what really pulled her through were the "Random acts of greatness like elderly ladies swooping in and cleaning up the place."
April 11, 2009
got an advanced reading copy of this through the bookstore. LOVED it. & by that i mean -- this book is difficult & true & heartbreaking & hilarious. wagner makes me simultaneously feel pretty much like a jerk for leaving the south & also a little grateful that at least some folk with a sense of humor & a deep, abiding love for the city & stamina for bullshit are still there, piecing their homes & lives back together.
this book is filled with gorgeous moments: at one point, wagner & her boyfriend jake are recovering from a couple years of rebuilding by staying in amsterdam for a minute (if i remember correctly?) & she's pissed about not being able to find any coffee shops with to-go cups. she muses that at least in new orleans, somebody would make you iced coffee in an MRE bag.
yes.
seriously, though, this book is out at the end of april. read it.
this book is filled with gorgeous moments: at one point, wagner & her boyfriend jake are recovering from a couple years of rebuilding by staying in amsterdam for a minute (if i remember correctly?) & she's pissed about not being able to find any coffee shops with to-go cups. she muses that at least in new orleans, somebody would make you iced coffee in an MRE bag.
yes.
seriously, though, this book is out at the end of april. read it.
July 14, 2009
Wagner, a contributor on NPR's This American Life, writes about the long process of recovery personally, as well as sharing the changes within her community, after Hurricane Katrina.
The tone of her memoir is conversational and provides an excellent account of living through an enormous natural disaster, and literally and figuratively rebuilding her life despite unending obstacles and bureaucracy. Her story is engaging and honest and includes a great deal of humor.
The tone of her memoir is conversational and provides an excellent account of living through an enormous natural disaster, and literally and figuratively rebuilding her life despite unending obstacles and bureaucracy. Her story is engaging and honest and includes a great deal of humor.
May 6, 2009
Brilliant. Bird's eye view of life in Mid-City post-Katrina. Complete with cameo from my friend Chris.
August 31, 2012
As you might imagine, this memoir is pretty depressing. It's a Katrina memoir, written by a woman who's in the vicinity of my age group, and tells the story of her and her partner's endless, miserable work to clean and restore their flooded home. The question she keeps asking herself (besides "should we run like hell") is, can New Orleans ever be the community it was, or did it drown and rot away with the stinking flood waters?
I really enjoyed the author's voice; it's not a funny story but she manages to infuse it with that quirky sensibility that makes New Orleans the one-of-a-kind melting pot it is. The only thing I didn't like was the abrupt ending, which wasn't an ending at all; I totally get the point, that the story was far from over and the work would go on and on, but it felt like the story needed some sort of thematic punctuation.
I have to admit the thought of doing what Cheryl and Jake did (I assume they succeeded) baffles me. I would have been one of the first people to say "screw it" and move away and not come back. But then again, the people of NOLA have something other cities don't - it's hard to define, but I've seen it in every person I've met who once called the city home. When you feel that connected to a place I guess it's worth the flood sweat and tears.
Anyway, if you want to know what life was *really* like in New Orleans after Katrina - written not as a horror story to exploit the suffering, but as an honest and gritty account of the months after a disaster when the rest of the world has moved on but your own home is still falling down - I highly recommend Plenty Enough Suck to Go Around.
I really enjoyed the author's voice; it's not a funny story but she manages to infuse it with that quirky sensibility that makes New Orleans the one-of-a-kind melting pot it is. The only thing I didn't like was the abrupt ending, which wasn't an ending at all; I totally get the point, that the story was far from over and the work would go on and on, but it felt like the story needed some sort of thematic punctuation.
I have to admit the thought of doing what Cheryl and Jake did (I assume they succeeded) baffles me. I would have been one of the first people to say "screw it" and move away and not come back. But then again, the people of NOLA have something other cities don't - it's hard to define, but I've seen it in every person I've met who once called the city home. When you feel that connected to a place I guess it's worth the flood sweat and tears.
Anyway, if you want to know what life was *really* like in New Orleans after Katrina - written not as a horror story to exploit the suffering, but as an honest and gritty account of the months after a disaster when the rest of the world has moved on but your own home is still falling down - I highly recommend Plenty Enough Suck to Go Around.
August 12, 2009
Post-Katrina New Orleans from the point of view of someone who returned to repair and live in her flooded Mid-City home. Cheryl Wagner writes conversationally (she's a radio commentator) and very personally about the what it was like to return with her boyfriend to their almost-deserted neighborhood and to do the exhausting work--physical and emotional--of restoring their home. Reading this book made me realize the incredible amount of energy and commitment it would have taken to return to New Orleans after the storm. It made me wonder if I would have taken one look at the same house and concluded that it was beyond hope. (Probably.) Wagner's descriptions of New Orleans culture and her pre-storm life provide a framework for understanding why whe would choose to rebuild. To stay in New Orleans meant battling mold, rust, rotten drywall, rotten bureaucracy, rats & roaches, and as time went on, crime and violence in the disrupted neighborhood. The story is amazing and is told with humor, yet you can hear the pain throughout. An excellent "on-the-ground" version of post-Katrina New Orleans.
April 15, 2009
Though there are some writing eccentricities here--a couple of places where perhaps the narrative jumps through time more than the reader is given cues for--this memoir completely captivated me. I learned a great deal about the New Orleans flood and its aftermath, and Wagner's tone really invited me in. Her focus is tight on her own neighborhood and experience, and yet her story reveals much about the whole disaster, without explicitly doing so. I am impressed by all she got this memoir of flood recovery--or perhaps I mean survival--to do, narratively and tonally. Her vision is pretty unflinching, and her insights are not highlighted or drawn out, but they are acute. Plus, the title completely rocks.
November 20, 2011
I wanted a book to give me an idea of what Katrina was like, and also what Nola felt like to a native. Wagner's story more than delivers on that, and with a writing style that makes the book feel like a different place. I was amazed at how long their personal cleanup took, and a little bit miffed by the total damage. Especially when I thought about buying this in the garden district last weekend & finding the city to be in good shape. (for those who don't know, as I didn't pre-visit, the garden district was not flooded during the storm.)
Thanks for the perspective, Wagner, on both Katrina and disaster.
Thanks for the perspective, Wagner, on both Katrina and disaster.
November 9, 2009
A good, but tough book to read. It's the kind of book you struggle through not because it's poorly written, but because the author does such a good job of making you feel her anxiety, frustration and zillion other emotions. It still blows my mind how colossally the government (federal, state and local) screwed up on Katrina and the rippling effects, even years later, that has had on the people of New Orleans and the other hard-hit Gulf-coast regions effected by this massive storm. Nothing like this should EVER happen again.
May 27, 2009
I know its contrite to say that a book is "honest." But, that is really the only word I can come up with to describe this one. Wagner is funny, blunt, and completely aware of her relative luck. It shifts this from being another raw look at this tragedy into something deeper and longer-lasting. Pretty amazing.
July 17, 2013
A raw real account about what it must have been like to live through and rebuild after Katrina. For those of us who lived far away, we had absolutely no idea. This author tells the story with truth and humor and I found myself rooting for her and her friends all the way through. I love NOLA and would live to go back to find her renewed neighborhood.
July 4, 2016
Whipped through this terrific memoir about the years after Cheryl Wagner's Mid-City New Orleans home was flooded in Hurricane Katrina. She captures, with the perfect amount of closeness, the trauma and endless challenge she and her boyfriend Jake encountered and overcame in their dedication to NOLA and the things about it that exists nowhere else.
August 19, 2009
schedule 3 hours, sit down and discuss with your friend what happened in New Orleans post-Katerina; this is what reading Cheryl feels like.
a great story, cutting words and a format that feels like home.
a great story, cutting words and a format that feels like home.
April 13, 2020
If I could give it 3.5, I would. An open letter to the city she loves, she is also processing trauma and grief. Sometimes that is beautiful, other times is a little—idk—privileged? I related a lot to the author who struggles with doing too much/not having it that bad with utter exhaustion/still has it pretty bad.
May 14, 2013
Pretty good. Some cunning language. This is the story of a sort of young white? couple of freelancers who live in New Orleans and dutifully and painfully and triumphantly and slowly rebuild the house they own in Mid-City after Hurricane Katrina. There are some lovely dog anecdotes, some real live disaster inspired bickering, death of future planning and stuff based economies lost to the flood, death of humans and friends and violence, family dynamics, pests, garbage and unknown toxic waste. The people are between the people rich enough to move away or redevelop and the people too poor to return or fix anything up. They do the work themselves, learning all kinds of new skills and drawing on all kinds of relationships for small bits of inspiration to make the tiniest improvements inch by inch. Sort of heart breaking and heart filling if you know what I mean. My favorite line was about this anti-dog suburban? Floridian: "Probably a bug hater. I've always thought a bug hater is a life hater.
March 21, 2010
Got this one with a Valentine's day GC, and unfortunately, I have to say it's been pretty much a rip so far. The author's style is not as terse as I tend to go for, and so far the story's pretty boring. It's also kinda funny how people reacted differently to the people who were stuck in NO after Katrina. Wagner and her partner complain non-stop about their friends who didn't leave (by choice) and now need help, but so far they stay right where they are in Gainesville, FL.
We'll see...the jury's still out.
Epic fail. Dull, dull, dull. Wagner fails to capture the strangeness that was Katrina. Humor? Maybe I just didn't get it...?
We'll see...the jury's still out.
Epic fail. Dull, dull, dull. Wagner fails to capture the strangeness that was Katrina. Humor? Maybe I just didn't get it...?
April 26, 2011
I admit, I have a particular soft spot for this book because of how often it references Helen Hill - the New Orleans filmmaker I so admired who was murdered after Katrina. And it felt like the Katrina story told by someone I could relate to - thirty-ish, gainfully employed but not in the usual way, no extra resources to help her out of the "my house just got flooded" jam. I especially liked the prologue about her knowing the kind of people who come up with crazy schemes and say "what a good idea" versus the usual "why on earth would you want to do that"? Life-affirming for those who usually hate inspirational books.
June 21, 2010
This was a difficult book. It's a very gritty memoir about one couple's experiences in the wake of Katrina. I thought that Wagner's use of email snippets to paint a picture of what she and her friends were thinking and feeling in the first days was especially powerful. Some parts are funny, but mostly it's about how Wagner and her boyfriend trudged through the recovery process. I only had to experience the hurricane more peripherally because of how it affected immediate family members; I suspect that if you went through it yourself, this book might still be a bit too raw to read.
February 11, 2015
Funny, clever, sad. From the first threat of Hurricane Katrina's descent into New Orleans and for two years after, Wagner describes government bureaucracy, frustration, misery, and loss of everything in a way that you feel guilty for smiling, and share the absolute chaos of post Katrina recovery. If you can even call it that. This doesn't fall into the misery memoir category- it goes into high adventure against all odds.
August 4, 2015
As an adopted New Orleanian and lover of the city, there was much in this book that resonated with me. Many of my friends faced the same dilemmas as Cheryl in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and we all shared the doubts, the concerns, the love, and the "suck" as we went through many rough years. She captures what it was to be in that indescribable space and time with clarity and humor and a true perspective. Worth the read.
November 23, 2010
I really enjoyed this memoir of one woman's experiences during and immediately after Hurricane Katrina. Wagner is a person I can imagine being friends with, and this really visceral account of how she and her boyfriend and community re-built after Katrina is very engagingly written and really personalized the story of that disaster for me. Recommended.
June 20, 2016
A book by Cheryl Wagner of the This American Life radio program about living through hurricane Katrina and it's aftermath. The book describes what it's like to like in a flooded house, fight with insurance companies, fight with FEMA, and lose friends to the crime wave that spread throughout the city, all while trying to rebuild your damaged home.
August 17, 2009
A memoir about surviving after hurricane katrina. Cheryl and her boyfriend (and two basset hounds) live in mid-city in New Orleans and their house is devestated in the flood. They are amazing people. There is no way I could have done what they did. Amazing story about human spirit.
June 20, 2009
Sad and funny at the same time. Good memoire of a couple who lived through the aftermath of Katrina and their trials and tribulations trying to restore their home after the flood. Brought New Orleans' tragedy home
January 23, 2021
Almost finished with this book. Its a quick, easy read. Its one couple's experience through Hurricane Katrina and rebuilding after. Its pretty interesting and hey, their lives are way crappier than mine.
August 22, 2009
To be fair, the author is one of my best friends from high school, but I think this memoir does a really good job of capturing life in New Orleans post-Katrina. Funny at times, but more often disturbing.
September 8, 2009
Really good; loved the author's "voice". Interesting perspective, especially between the folks in New Orleans who DID flood and those who did NOT. Best Katrina book I've read other than Chris Rose's heart wrenching collection of Times-Picayune articles, One Dead in the Attic.
September 15, 2009
Funny at times, heartbreaking at others, this is a memoir about a couple in the throes of post-Katrina damage control. If you love NOLA (like me) and would like a glimpse of what it was like after the flood with a side of humor and a dose of awesome dog characters, you could pick this one.
April 7, 2010
This one crossed my desk today; evidently she's a public radio contributor... say, like, Sarah Vowell, David Sedaris?? This one is about Hurricane Kaatrina. The prologue reads a lot like Marion Winik. (Makes me love her and want to buy the book RIGHT NOW!)
October 15, 2012
Certainly not "high literature", but a very personal and well-written account on the author's experiences with Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath in New Orleans. I found it deeply moving and insightful.
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