Singing Out Loud: A Memoir of an Ex-Mardi Gras Queen

Born during World War II, Marilee Eaves has long struggled to fit into the New Orleans elite—secret Mardi Gras societies that ruled the city—into which she was born. Then, as a student at Wellesley, she’s hospitalized at McLean psychiatric hospital, where she begins to realize how much of herself she’s sacrificed to blend into and be fully accepted by the exclusive and exclusionary white Uptown New Orleans culture to which she supposedly belongs.

In Singing Out Loud, Eaves tells of her jour...