Rachael Johns’ new book: My interview with New Orleans
Gravestones, vampire brides and ghosts mingle with life-affirming pleasures in a city that Rachael Johns couldn’t ignore for her new book.
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Food and jazz; ghosts and vampires; graves and gardens ... RACHAEL JOHNS’ new novel is in part a love story for a town that stole her heart.
My father was French. As I walked through the French Quarter of New Orleans I wondered if that is why I felt so at home. There’s a vibe in the French Quarter, which that makes every moment feel like a celebration. To a tourist like me, it initially felt like a party town. Street performers dance and sing in the middle of the road. Everyone seems to be in a good mood. Jazz music from the colourful houses drifts into the street, cocktails are passed around.
But it has a darker past, too. The shame of slavery, the darkness of voodoo and the brutality of those same French settlers also influenced its culture and the lives of its people. I have never been to a place where the layers of the past are so evident in its present. Ghosts are all around. It’s catnip for a writer.
In a world both completely familiar and deeply strange, I filled a notebook with observations: the taste of beignets, eye-watering aromas, the music (always the music), the melodic names of streets –- Decatur, Dauphine, Chartres and Bourbon (not the drink but the name of the French Royal family).
I found myself lured away from the conference I was supposed to be attending to watch a bridal party and their guests dance joyfully down the road lead by a brass band parade (known as the Second Line). I sheltered from flash flooding then walked through the Garden District, where the long-established gardens released the scent of magnolia and jasmine and the majestic live oaks that lined the streets ruled the district. I dined at the famous blue restaurant – The Commander’s Palace – tasting turtle soup and spicy Creole gumbo, but it was the visit to nearby Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 that lit my imagination. Above-ground graves house multiple generations of a family and after a year of being entombed there, the remains are swept to the base of the tomb, ready for the next member.
It seemed inevitable that New Orleans would form the setting for my next book. I knew as I walked around and admired the gothic-looking graves, that this cemetery would influence the tone. A crumbling pink mansion I photographed would become the perfect home for one of my favourite characters and that Fritzel’s European Jazz Pub, where I sat on a church bench and drank Hurricane cocktails while a jazz pianist wowed the room, would become the setting for my jazz musician love interest.
And so it was. In How to Mend a Broken Heart, eccentric elderly artist Aurelia lives in the pink house and paints pictures of skeleton brides. Her story is a tribute to the gothic tale of the ‘Casket Brides’, young women sold into marriage or prostitution who took a terrible revenge by becoming vampires, but also to the atmosphere of Lafayette Cemetery.
My central character, Flick (who comes to New Orleans trying to escape her heartbreak and looking for an adventure) has a chance encounter with Theo – a jazz musician – who changes her life. There was so much about New Orleans that piqued my imagination. My only problem when I returned to Perth was deciding what had to be left out from the rich experience it offers. If I couldn’t leave behind my husband and family (and I couldn’t!) and move into one of those charming but touristy French Quarter apartments, then I would do did what writers do – recreate that world in my next novel.
The darkness and light of New Orleans culture sits in its extraordinary music, its architecture, its history, its food and its people, but something more. Actor John Goodman once said, ‘An incomplete part of our chromosomes gets repaired or found in New Orleans. Some of us just belong here’ and that’s exactly how I feel. The setting of How to Mend a Broken Heart is a kind of homage and a kind of antidote to the longing I feel for New Orleans, a city that gets under your skin like the lover you can’t forget.
How to Mend a Broken Heart, by Rachael Johns and published by HQ Fiction, is out now. Our new Book of the Month is The End of Men by Christina Sweeney-Baird. Head to Booktopia and enter code END at checkout to receive 30% off the RRP of $29.99. And tell us which books inspire your wanderlust at the Sunday Book Club group on Facebook.
Originally published as Rachael Johns’ new book: My interview with New Orleans
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