Misery

Like everyone in America, I think, I am feeling a sense of despair over New Orleans. I am so grateful and humbled to have heard from fans of Diary of a Blues Goddess, a novel I wrote set in New Orleans, that was released two years ago. People assumed I lived in New Orleans or had family there. I do not, but I am a huge jazz fan, and it is--was--a city that I felt embodied a multicultural melting pot, eclectic and vibrant. To see it drowning . . . I just cry.
When you write a novel, you write of the highs and lows of life. No one is going to read 350 pages of the mundane tasks of life--doing laundry, cooking, cleaning up after the kids, walking the dog. So novelists write of the moments that make or break a person's humanity, they write of triumphs and they write of those darkest hours that change a character forever. When we look back on our own lives, we remember the high points--the birth of a child, the day we got married--and we remember the low ones--for me, nearly dying 12 years ago, and other struggles, events that changed me. But what the people of New Orleans are going through is a national disgrace . . . and never in my wildest imaginings, could I have pictured AMERICA coming to this. I feel like I am watching something out of a sci-fi movie of the end of days, of the end of the earth.
In this atmosphere, the occasional stories of strangers opening their homes, of a baby saved, or an old man reunited with his loved ones . . . they are the only things that make me hope for something better.