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-Hello, and welcome back to "Book Lust."
I'm Nancy Pearl. My guest today is Susan Straight
and we'll be talking about many of her books,
but especially her new book just out, "Sacrament."
Susan, thank you so much for coming onto the show, today.
-I'm a huge fan, Nancy.
My mom taught me to read when I was three,
and then the next day, took me to my local public library
where I still go now.
-Well, I have to say I'm such a fan of yours
because one of my favorite books that I still remember
how much I loved it was one of your very early books.
It wasn't your first book
but it was "I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen
and Licked Out All the Pots,"
which should have won an award for the best title.
It's such a terrific title. And...
-The title came from my mother-in-law, which is funny.
I got married really young.
I met my future husband
when I was in freshman year of high school on the school bus.
But my mother-in-law was maybe born in Mississippi,
maybe born in California, maybe born in Oklahoma,
and in her kitchen,
when everybody, we were all cooking,
somebody older would always say.
"Well, I'm not worried about that.
I've been in sorrow's kitchen and licked out all the pots."
And I thought, well, that's a great phrase.
And she's saying she doesn't care at all, anymore.
I liked that. -Yeah.
When you talked about your mother-in-law just now
and that it was so sort of unclear where she came from.
I just I read...
after I finished "Sacrament," I went back and reread,
"In the Country of Women,"
which is both a memoir but it's also...
well, how would you describe it?
-Wow.
One of my favorite books is Deborah Miranda,
"Bad Indians," published by Heyday.
And yeah, I think both Deborah Miranda,
who's writing about being indigenous in California,
and I were trying to place our family history
and our personal history
but always in terms of the landscape.
So you're right.
It's a memoir but not of me, necessarily,
but of all these women that came from,
you know, Switzerland, my mom, my grandmother
that I never met who went to the prairies of Colorado.
And then my mother-in-law's family,
which began, of course, during enslavement in Mississippi.
And I think it's a memoir of America in itself
because it's that journey that women make across the country
and get to Southern California just like men did
but no one ever talked about the women.
-Right.
-I remember thinking about that when I was little.
My mother would be very adamant
and she's a tiny woman from Switzerland.
She's 90.
She'll be 91 next month and I take care of her
in the afternoons because she has dementia.
But she's still just as adamant even with dementia
that no one ever wanted to listen to her stories.
And so maybe that's the part of the memoir that feels different.
-Yeah. It was so it was sort of loving
and respectful of the strength of the women
that you write about.
I was very moved by it.
-Thank you and I think for me raising three daughters,
one of the things I can say to you
because I trust you because you love books,
too, is that like I grew up, books were my companion.
I was the oldest of five kids in my mom's family.
My dad had left us and then I was the youngest of five kids
if I would go visit my dad.
So there was no way to win there.
And there I was doing all the chores
for five kids younger than me
or I was getting beat up by the four older step-kids.
But books were my companion and the idea of what a memoir is
and the idea of what women's stories are came to me
early on through all those great books.
You know, "Anne of Green Gables,"
but "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," Nancy,
was the one that I kept reading over and over
because Francie's mother was fierce.
She was not, you know, this tender, loving mom.
She was very fierce
and she would protect her daughter at all cost.
And you remember that scene
where she shoots the guy who was trying to...
-Yes. Yeah. -I never forget that and I...
-Me, either.
-No.
I thought if I'm going to be a mom of three daughters,
I want to write a memoir that has the truth in it
and it is respectful
but there's also a lot of hard parts in there about,
you know, what happened to us. And my kids said...
my daughter says,
"Why didn't you ever tell us these things
that happened to you?"
And I said, "Because we don't tell our daughters.
We tell our friends and our sisters."
And I say this all over the country
when I go talk especially to young women
and but I've even I've been to Turkey and Mexico City
to talk about violence against women.
And all women say,
"Well, I would tell my friends or my cousins.
I would tell them in the car.
I would tell them in the kitchen.
But I would never tell." -Yeah, yeah.
In that memoir,
"In the Country of Women," in that sort of story of women
in the world that we know, today.
You talk about your becoming a writer
and one particular writer who was so important to you,
one of your teachers.
Could you talk about that? Because that's another,
you know, we always talk about mentors
or so I think that's important, too.
-Well, interestingly,
I had read James Baldwin when I was ten, 11 years old.
I read, "Go Tell it on the Mountain,"
and I still have that original copy.
I mean, you could buy paperbacks at, you know, the grocery store.
And so, first of all, I read, "Sula," by Toni Morrison,
when I was 12, as well.
Those original books are still...
I thought their covers were beautiful
and they were 50 cents.
And so I used the money that I got from babysitting
and cleaning houses to buy books at...do
you remember the rotating paperback?
-Yes, I do, the spinner racks. That's what they were called.
-And the other favorite book of mine is "Sounder."
So these three books are still on my desk,
like the original paperbacks that I bought.
But I would have never imagined
that I would have met James Baldwin.
But what I loved from a little kid reading
"Go Tell it on the Mountain,"
which I didn't understand all of it,
was these multiple points of view.
Like you're all the way inside John's head
and he's vacuuming, you know, the carpet,
and I knew nothing about a place like New York
or a carpet like that.
But this idea of what his neighborhood was
was so similar to mine.
You know, the boys, including my younger brother
who died very young and violently,
you know, in my neighborhood, there were no girls.
There was only three of us,
and then the boys just ran wild,
and they were doing scary, terrible things,
and I watched them from outside like the screen of my window.
And I thought James Baldwin was writing
about this kind of thing, this same thing.
So I never thought I would meet him,
but yes, when I went to graduate school, I was already married.
I got married very young to the guy I met in the...
on the freshman bus.
And we were in... I was in graduate school
and here was James Baldwin just as kind
and also just so patient and philosophical.
And so I love telling my students now...
I have a student right now, a graduate student from Uganda,
Glaydah Namukasa,
and she's been struggling with this book.
And finally, I sat down with her and I said,
"This is about the secondary characters.
That's why you're stuck because you don't know
where the plot goes."
And she looked at me and I had tears in my eyes.
And I said, "Because I was taught that by James Baldwin.
This thing that people don't often think about.
You have...
you think you have a plot and you have main characters,
but the secondary characters are who really moves the world
along in our lives, too."
And so he was really a kind mentor to me.
He came to our house for dinner.
I'll never forget this, Nancy.
He... we were so poor.
We lived in married student housing
and it was a gray linoleum one-bedroom
married student housing in Amherst.
And he said,
"This is so bad it reminds me of my first apartment in Harlem
and so I like to be here." And I was like, "Oh, good."
So I cooked lasagna and he brought a bunch of friends.
And my then husband had to work night shift
and so he was not a happy camper that these...
all these famous writers were in house,
but he did his best.
And James Baldwin wandered over.
I had a card table.
I wrote on a card table by a window
and it had a boom box, you know, the old black boom box.
I had this quote.
It said, "With the rhythm it takes to dance to,
what we have to live through,
you can dance under water and not get wet."
And he stood there.
It was just handwritten and I had taped it to the window.
And he said,
"This is the most profound thing I've read in many years."
And he said, "Who wrote this?" And I said, "George Clinton."
And he said, "Who's that?"
And I said, "You know, he's a songwriter and bandleader."
And so he said, "I need to hear him."
So I played him Funkadelic "Aqua Boogie" in this...
in the kitchen and he just he said,
"You have to write about this." -Yeah, wow.
-And so the boom box made itself known in two
of my first short stories.
He had... he read them both
and those were the stories that he got movement.
-Well, when you talk...
first, I want to say
that I went to my neighborhood drugstore to buy a copy...
to sneak out and buy a copy of "Peyton Place."
And that was 50 cents, or 75 cents, maybe,
because it was so thick, you know, as I remember it.
But I couldn't show my parents when I came...
my mother, when I came home.
So, yes, I do remember that kind of thing.
So your new book, "Sacrament."
When you talked about the secondary characters, these...
and inhabiting different points of view
so you see the different points of view,
you put that sort of all
together so wonderfully in "Sacrament."
So "Sacrament" is set at the beginning
in August of the first COVID year.
You know, I think probably a lot of...
you could describe this as saying it's a COVID novel
but it's not just a COVID novel, you know.
It's a novel about these three women who are nurses
who are sacrificing everything
to care for these patients with no end in sight
because that was so much before there was a vaccine.
And I know you brought forward a character,
at least one character,
from an earlier, from "Mecca,"
you had brought forward, which I was very grateful for
because I, too, had a big crush on him.
-You had a big crush on Johnny Frias?
-Yeah, right, right.
And so I was glad to see him appear in this book.
But where did the idea for this come from?
-Well, and I have to tell you that I...
so "Mecca," my previous book,
ends three weeks before "Temperament" starts.
And Johnny Frias,
I had hundreds of e-mails from readers, women readers, saying,
"Why can't Johnny Frias have a woman?
Like why can't he find love? I mean, mija, come on."
Like, right? "Let him fall in love."
And so I was like, okay,
I'm actually going to think about that.
Because I came close in "Mecca," but yes.
So I'm...
it's just it's so nice to talk to someone
who's a deep and concentrated reader like you
are because that's how I am, too.
And the polyphonic novel, which is something,
again, I love that word because no one really talks about
how James Baldwin, you know, even with
"If Beale Street Could Talk," you're talking
about multiple points of view.
And I love explaining to my students how that lets
us use even landscape as a point of view, right?
So "Mecca" ends and Larette Embers is an ICU nurse,
and her husband, Grief, who's an animal control officer,
have been having to leave their son, Dante,
you know, in little brief times during COVID.
And Dante's a character that is in "Mecca" and he's a young kid.
He's 13. But Larette is somebody
I've been writing about for a long time.
I had been writing all these pieces about her
and she's a nurse in the ICU.
She sings beautifully and she's one of those women
who sang since high school.
And then, you know,
she sings in like the Rialto Community Players.
And, you know, there are so many women who sing beautifully.
In every community,
there will be a woman who sings better than anyone
you could hear on the radio.
And so I kept thinking about her
and she loved to sing when she was in high school.
And she married Grief very young.
She needs to force him to answer her with lyrics to things like,
you know, "My Favorite Things."
Like he would have to come up with lyrics.
That's her test. So I loved the two of them.
They remind me of all the people I went to high school with.
You know, all my friends are still like this.
So Larette sings to patients
when they're in a coma during COVID.
And you're right,
like I was really scared to write about COVID.
I was.
I was afraid that publishers would say, "Oh, my gosh.
You know, we don't want to think about COVID."
But we still read about World War II.
We still read about World War I.
I will read anything about the Dust Bowl.
I will read anything about the Holocaust.
I will read anything about the Great Depression.
And I feel as if there was not yet a COVID novel
but a novel that talked about what it was like to be nurses,
but also what it was like to be the family members.
Because everyone... I had COVID three times.
My ex-husband almost died of COVID.
My next-door neighbor had COVID the day
before they knew what the name COVID was
and he fell over in my parking strip
and the ambulance came to took him away...
to take him away.
And his wife and I, we couldn't touch him.
Like we couldn't go help him up.
And that was, you know,
nurses would FaceTime us from the hospital.
And when my ex-husband was in the hospital for his week
where he almost died, it was the nurses who FaceTimed us.
And so all of this together made me think about this disconnect
in a different way.
Like people have talked about, "I moved away."
But truthfully, I've people tell me,
"COVID was the best thing that ever happened in my life."
And I just, for me, I lost my neighbors.
I lost friends. I lost relatives.
My across-the-street neighbor, Jim Calderone,
died in his house and was taken out in a body bag while my...
me and the other neighbors watched.
And he had diabetes. He had lost both of his legs.
I have a friend who kept telling her brother
to go to the hospital. He was 35 and he didn't do it.
And finally, when he drove himself,
he pulled over on the side of the road and died in his car.
No one found him for a while.
And those are stories
that you just I think you don't hear and that's
where Johnny Frias comes in
because he's patrolling the roads.
But Larette is asked to sing to the patients
and she sings all of the old-school songs
because that's my community, you know,
Art Laboe, filler oldies, low riders.
And so I just had to go with that even
though I was scared to do...
to write about the actual thing that nurses do.
You know, they turned over these giant men onto their stomachs
so they could breathe.
And, I mean, these are big, big men, and yeah,
they were turned onto their stomachs,
and my nurse friends and neighbors
would tell me how tender the backs of these large men were.
They would say,
"When I turned him over,
you wouldn't believe how soft his skin was."
And I couldn't get that out of my...
-Yeah, I think the sacrifices that the nurses made,
I think in some ways, we've forgotten that.
We, you know, we've forgotten what it was like
before vaccinations, before COVID, you know,
before we knew what it was and how to prevent it, if you will.
And you brought that back so, you know, you sort of I...
it was like visceral,
like it sort of took me back to that time, you know,
when my daughter-in-law and my daughter called and said,
"Don't, you know, you can't go to that restaurant."
You know, this was in March of 2020.
"No, you can't go to that restaurant.
You can't go anywhere. Stay home."
So I...
but the other thing that you do in this book
which I really appreciated was you wrote also
from the point of view of teenagers who really don't...
didn't understand.
How could they? And it just appeared...
it just seemed to me you just got them so right,
that kind of craziness thinking that happens.
-I mean, again, I learned so much from James Baldwin
about who drives the engine even in our own hearts
while we're writing.
And I had Larette, who sings, and then her cousin, Cherrise,
who is a widow, and who's much more like hardcore
and, you know, likes her tequila.
And she and her daughter are together.
Like they're just that's the family unit.
She's never gotten married again.
And so then I kept thinking about her daughter
because these nurses go live in RVs and so that also happened.
Like on my block, traveling nurses who had rented rooms,
and also on the next block and the block after that,
people would park RVs and then,
you know, donate them so that nurses could walk.
The hospital's only three blocks from my house.
That's where I was born and where everybody was going.
And so it was very intense. I know in New York,
people would talk about sirens constantly going by
and that's how it was for me, as well.
These nurses would literally walk by my house
at like 6:00 PM on their way to 7:00 PM 12-hour shift
and then they'd walk back on the way home.
And I'd be out in the yard with the dog.
I also had my three of my grown kids were living at the house
and they would tell me these amazing stories
but then they were so lonely.
They would be FaceTiming their kids and they would say,
"Oh, here's Susan's sunflowers. Here's Susan's dog.
Look, here's Susan waving behind you."
Like for three months.
So Raquel, the daughter of Cherrise,
is really upset when her mom goes to live in this RV
because she's 15 and she can't stay in the house by herself.
And so she's shipped out to the Coachella Valley
and I've written about Coachella many times.
That was a main location in "Mecca," as well.
And suddenly, I realized, well, of course,
her mom was married to someone from Torres-Martinez,
and so there is Raquel, a prickly 15-year-old,
and she's living with her 82-year-old great aunt.
-Right.
-She is out in it's 120 in August in Coachella
and the date harvest is just going on.
And, you know, Nancy, again,
like I don't hang out with writer.
I mean, I hang out with my neighbors and we...
and my family and we never talk about books.
But it's fun to say this to you.
I was like what's Raquel going to do out here?
And all of a sudden,
here comes Joey Ortiz and he's like up
in the date palms so he's harvesting.
And then I'm like, oh, okay, well, here's Joey.
And I thought why can't I write about what it's like
to be a 15-year-old girl
who's sent out to the middle of nowhere
and who's been doing everything on STEM Academy virtual,
which just was soul killing. And she just came to me
and she ended up being one of my favorite characters
like I've written, so.
-Well, the other thing about that book is I felt
like I learned so much about dates and date...
the date harvests. And I have to say, I never...
it never occurred to me what,
I mean, I felt like I learned so much.
It was great.
-Yeah, we're not famous for too much in Riverside County
that people would remember.
But I will tell you that 99% of all dates
that are grown in America
and they're shipped across the world
are grown in Coachella Valley.
And I've been going out there since I was five.
My mom, being from Switzerland,
thought that the Coachella Valley was
heaven because it was 120 degrees
and she grew up freezing in the Alps in Switzerland.
And so she would drag us out there and we would get dates.
And also, dates were such a huge deal for people who grew up in,
you know, a cold winter, that date.
So I have been to the date farms
many times on reporting assignments.
I've written about this particular date farm
over ten years
and some of the favorite things I learned
is that when you harvest, the date blossoms.
I was there when the palmeros,
the Barbery family originally from Ujikan in the 1900s,
they cut the blossoms and thousands
of bees would follow us.
And they put it on a flatbed and we just kind of ran.
And there were just thousands of bees
because you have to lock the huge date blossoms,
which are six, seven-feet long,
and they look like peacock tails.
And you lock them in a shed
so that the bees don't steal all the pollen
and then the palmeros extract the pollen
and spray it onto the date palm. I mean,
once I learned that, I was like how can I not write about dates.
-Right.
But I didn't even think
that American dates were shipped like to Turkey.
Susan Straight. Her new book is "Sacrament."
It's a sequel of sorts to "Mecca"
but they're totally self-standing.
You don't have to read one before the other.
And she gets...
what Susan does so well is get at the hearts of her characters.
And I think if you're somebody
who loves character-driven fiction,
as I do, that you're a writer to get to know.
So thank you.
-Thanks so much.
It was so much fun to talk to you.
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