Photo credit: Craig Mulcahy
Describe your latest book.
For several months — maybe years — following the near-destruction of New Orleans by the levee failures that followed Hurricane Katrina, I wandered around telling everybody that everything was fine. I was fine, my family was fine, the city was going to be fine. Now, obviously, I was lying, but I didn’t know it at the time. It can take a while to absorb the fact that your home and everyone you know is in a state of ruin.
If I am remembering right (and I am not sure of the truth of anything I remember from those years), I was still saying things were peachy when I began to write
The Floating World, the story of a New Orleans family who leave their fragile eldest daughter, Cora, to ride out the storm on her own...