"I certainly wanted to write a book that was honest about New Orleans without explaining it to death, so much so that the first draft contained references absolutely incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't lived here for several years"
About this Quote
There is a particular New Orleans flex embedded in Brite's line: the refusal to translate. The city gets packaged for outsiders so often - as mood board, as haunted backdrop, as cocktail garnish - that "explaining it to death" reads like both craft advice and cultural self-defense. Brite is staking out a third option between fetishizing local color and flattening it into a guided tour: let the texture stay messy, insiderish, even rude.
The "first draft" detail matters because it admits the temptation to build a wall. Those "absolutely incomprehensible" references aren't just easter eggs; they're a test of belonging. You can feel the author negotiating the ethics of that impulse. Total opacity can become gatekeeping, a private joke that turns real places into cliques. But total legibility is its own violence, a kind of explanatory overreach that turns lived reality into trivia for consumption.
New Orleans, with its layered histories of colonization, race, Catholic ritual, music economies, storm trauma, and tourist mythology, is especially vulnerable to being over-captioned. Brite's sentence frames honesty as fidelity to how a city is actually experienced: in shorthand, in half-stories, in names that carry baggage, in references that assume you already know. The subtext is craft and politics intertwined: keep the local cadence, resist the brochure, but still write a book that lets outsiders in without letting the city be reduced to a lesson plan.
The "first draft" detail matters because it admits the temptation to build a wall. Those "absolutely incomprehensible" references aren't just easter eggs; they're a test of belonging. You can feel the author negotiating the ethics of that impulse. Total opacity can become gatekeeping, a private joke that turns real places into cliques. But total legibility is its own violence, a kind of explanatory overreach that turns lived reality into trivia for consumption.
New Orleans, with its layered histories of colonization, race, Catholic ritual, music economies, storm trauma, and tourist mythology, is especially vulnerable to being over-captioned. Brite's sentence frames honesty as fidelity to how a city is actually experienced: in shorthand, in half-stories, in names that carry baggage, in references that assume you already know. The subtext is craft and politics intertwined: keep the local cadence, resist the brochure, but still write a book that lets outsiders in without letting the city be reduced to a lesson plan.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|
More Quotes by Poppy
Add to List
