Meet Me in the Garden: A Guest Post from Nina Lacour

My grandmother was the youngest of three sisters. Born into a tightknit New Orleans Creole community, they were glamorous and opinionated and smart. Sometimes they fought, as sisters do, but in my memories I see them seated three-across, still glamorous into their nineties, holding court with the family’s younger generations in the Los Angeles shade. 

Before Meet Me in the Garden I’d never written historical fiction. But the mystique of my grandmother’s stories has always allured me–her New Orleans youth, her migration to Los Angeles, her time working at Columbia Records’ Hollywood pressing plant, her Compton neighborhood where she raised my dad among aunts and uncles and cousins who were also neighbors. It was undeniably rich subject matter for a novel.

The real places and the true stories with their themes of race and motherhood and music…these shaped the world of my book. But in order to write a novel that was truly mine, I needed to conjure a character who was not based on my grandmother or grandaunts, a woman all her own.  

At long last, she came to me: Odette. The youngest of the three sisters, and the one who never quite belongs. An artist and a lesbian in mid-twentieth century America, a chameleon by necessity. The novel opens in a garden when Odette is eighteen. She and her closest confidant exchange secrets of forbidden love. They make plans for their lives that diverge from societal expectations and constraints–plans that soon take a turn and rip them apart 

For five years, as I worked on this novel, history and family details and imagined elements merged in my mind. The train ride on the Sunset Limited line from New Orleans to Los Angeles? Real. The woman Odette was in love with? Imagined. The young man frequently arrested for loitering and “suspicious character”? Real, but lifted from an older generation. I sank so deeply and willingly into Odette and her family’s experience that when I took walks, I’d see through her eyes. When I rode the same forty-eight hour train route that my grandparents once did, I felt my characters around me, smoking their cigarettes, resting their heads on one another’s shoulders. Odette’s world was often painful to live in but it was also incredibly lush and beautiful and full of love.

My grandparents both died before I began writing this novel, but I can hear my grandfather saying, “That’s wonderful, honey,” and see the mischievous glimmer in my grandmother’s eyes that accompanied the stories of her youth. A long time passes over the course of the novel–twenty years–and I feel time bending as I remember what it was like seeing the world through the eyes of a character who belonged to my grandparents’ culture and generation. Through Odette, I was able to engage with the parts of their lives I never knew firsthand. Now, I’m able to pass along the gifts of their stories to you.