The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story (P.S.) [Paperback]

I lived in New Orleans for several years, luckily I managed to move far away a couple of years before Katrina, so I missed all of that. So when I learned about this book I thought it would be fascinating to read about someone else's experiences living there and dealing with contractors and construction (like I did) and going through all the horror of Katrina. In the end, the book was not fascinating, it was a bit tedious, sometimes infuriating, and occasionally interesting and maybe even a little entertaining.

I don't want readers out there to think, based on the author's experiences, that all the locals hang out at Galatoire's drinking vodka all day because no one expects you to come back to the office after lunch. I worked for a living, I owned a tour company and later I had office jobs. I assure you if I spent all day drinking my lunch at a super expensive landmark restaurant someone would definitely care and I would dearly pay for it. In fact, I never knew any locals who ever even went to Galatoire's, no one I knew could afford it, and Galatoire's is considered to be mostly for tourists anyway.

Julia Reed is obviously pretty wealthy, so it was hard to identify with her or commiserate with her when her fabulous 6,000 square foot Garden District millionaire's mansion had a leak in the sunroom. It's hard to care when she gets a checking account from daddy with $5000 in it after she evacuates from the storm when so many other people didn't have anything. It's hard to give a damn when sometimes it seemed like all she really cared about was getting her servants back after the storm. My New Orleans friends and I never had servants, my house was nowhere near the Garden District, I lived in the 9th ward, I owned my own business and worked hard as hell so I could eat at places like Louisiana Pizza Kitchen, Angeli, and Coop's Place---none of which are expensive or owned by John Besh and other star chefs/friends of Reed's. And that's not to say that she should be criticized for being wealthy and having a far cushier life in New Orleans than I did, it's just hard to care about her and her story when she has so much and when I was there I watched most people all around me suffer daily under crushing poverty and extreme crime.

What I found rather repugnant was her attitude towards the people who came from all over the country to rescue the stranded and starving pets. She seems to find great sport in making fun of them and belittling their efforts. When she sees an aviary rescue van she wonders what's the big deal about rescuing people's pet birds while New Orleans has some wild parakeets that fly around the city. Well, maybe because these pet birds are not wild and they're not flying around the city, they're trapped in cages unfed and unwatered alone and dying in hot or flooded houses crawling with mold, maybe that's why there were people out there trying to rescue them. I found her comments ridiculous and unfeeling, she was more worried about getting her house finished, her servants back, and her expensive restaurant hang outs reopened so she could hurry up and get back to her normal leisurely life.

On top of everything, the author's obsession with alcohol throughout the entire book, mentioning it in some way just about every 2 pages or so, gets very tedious. Very few people I knew living in New Orleans were this obsessed with drinking, and the ones that were desperately needed rehab. Tourists, of course, go to New Orleans in droves specifically to drink and stagger around the garbage piled streets of the French Quarter, but honestly, all the locals I knew and did business with and were friends with all around the city were far too busy to sit around drinking and obsessing about fine wines and expensive liquors all the time. Julia Reed's New Orleans is nothing like my New Orleans, and that's a shame because the New Orleans I experienced was a lot more realistic and gritty, as well as fascinating and entertaining.

Having lived my entire life in southwestern Louisiana and having experienced and worked in the aftermath of my fair share of hurricanes, I picked up "The House On First Street" by Julia Reed hoping to get a firsthand account of Hurricane Katrina.

As expected, the bulk of the book is centered on the refurbishment of Reed's house pre- and post-Katrina in the beautiful Garden District of New Orleans. Through poor decisions and plain ol' dumb luck, Reed experiences trial after trial attempting to get her home to a liveable degree. Her complications are not unfamiliar to anybody who has ever attempted to refurbish an old home. Still, her writing style does make the whole experience fun to read.

She does an excellent job of describing the Crescent City. She gives vivid details on all of the typical tourist traps like Bourbon Street and Anne Rice's rather unique former home, but is at her best when giving descriptions of the food that can be found throughout the city. This is also where Reed's detachment from reality can be found.

It's obvious that Reed has plenty of money. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. She doesn't even try to hide it (Marie Antoinette references and countless name-droppings to boot). However, the fact that she isn't lacking for funds gives this Katrina story an entirely different spin.

Many folks (including my brother who's lived close to twenty years in the Big Easy) were worried about their homes, missing family and friends, jobs and futures. Others were trying to establish their lives in new homes such as Dallas, Houston, or one of the countless other cities that graciously took in refugees (yes, I said refugees) from New Orleans.

Reed, on the other hand, wondered if her wine was still in good shape and whether or not she'd be able to get lump crabmeat from her regular place. When some reasonable amount of normalcy returns to the city, her biggest fear is not getting a beagle pup to complete her domestic experience. After a deserved bashing of local and state government officials, she gets upset when "idiot Baptists" in Denton, TX unwittingly hand over her homeless, drug-addicted helper to his "wife" who encourages his addiction. Those "idiots," along with a lot of other private and religious groups, were some of the first people to assist folks in New Orleans when the aforementioned public officals failed miserably.

In short, while I read this book I got the feeling that Reed is something of a snob who has her priorities mixed up. Granted, she did quite a bit to help the city get back on its feet such as hosting and helping organize the Rebirth New Orleans benefit. She also handed out food to the many wonderful National Guardsmen who were trying to establish order in a chaotic world, but I kept seeing a bit of arrogance throughout her writing. It's this arrogance that really killed my enjoyment of her book.

Her fairy tale experience of New Orleans is a fun read, but I'm sure the folks who survived Katrina in towns like Waveland, MS and St. Bernard, LA have much more interesting stories that the average reader can more closely identify with. I can't wait until one of them puts out a book.

Julia Reed should have saved these New Orleans memoirs to use as cookbook filler and changed the name. There's more food, family, and friends mentioned in this book than there is storyline about the actual house on First Street and the Katrina aftermath. Reed was not really a victim of Katrina at all. Her house only suffered blown down trees and one broken window. She is, however, a victim of bad business decisions and the book suffers from poor editing.

The book starts off great with Reed telling back story about how she settled in New Orleans to report on governor Edwin Edwards, and lived in a quaint apartment off Bourbon. You really get a sense of the ambiance and decadence and drinks and food and people that make up the Big Easy. I was hooked right from the start!

At 42, she marries and buys her dream home in the garden district. But her husband has no voice in the novel. As a reader, you never get to know him. There is also an array of other friends and family members all over the map that just cloud the storyline because you can never keep any of them straight. It's like someone regurgitating a long phone conversation they just had with a distant relative and summarizing to get to the good parts.

The hurricane hits. Reed is tucked away safely at her parent's house and watching the chaos on television like everyone else. She uses her reporter status to get back into the city. After finding little damage done to her house, Reed spends the rest of the book telling you all the things she did for other people. Such as, she fed the Oklahoma National Guard on a daily basis and even ordered barbecue for 700 of them. Don't get me wrong, she definitely did some good things for people and I commend her for that. But maybe that could have been the focus of the book, instead of a house on First Street, which by now has long been forgotten back on page 20.

There are other tiny plot lines that offer up interest, but she never dives deep into them, such as "Here Lives Vera" or Ruthie the Duck Lady. So, the book ends up being a tangled grapevine of short stories and character sketches that leave you wanting more. The story of the self-appointed neighborhood watchman and his many "colorful" signs was the only Katrina survivor story which she spent a lot of worthwhile time on.

As for the house, Reed continues to shell out tons of money and put up with a bad contractor and poor workmanship. If I had to have someone repaint my bathroom three times or reinstall door knobs because they were upside down, I probably would have fired them. Instead, Reed even puts up with a homeless drugged-out workman who she is passionate about saving. She bails him out of jail and hires him a lawyer, and he still gets picked up for not paying his fines, leaving Reed to hold out money to pay his legal fees for him. Some people never learn...author included.

At 200 pages, this is a quick read and very humorous, but I often felt like a stranger at a party floating through a crowded room of people I don't know and only overhearing parts of their conversation, or like I was reading the diary of a food critic. Since Reed and the reader learn her house is okay very soon in the book, we spend most of the middle part of the book trying out all the restaurants as they begin to reopen. Po boys, watermelon pickles, lump crab, shrimp, grits, etouffee, bloody marys, oysters, remoulade, and meuniere clutter every page! I grew so tired of reading about all this food. All it did was make me hungry...for food and for structure to this book.

As for editing, by now you know this book is all over the place. At one point, Reed is planning a fundraiser, then spends a chapter telling you all about the political gossip of Edwards from 1991 out of nowhere (she'd already covered his storyline in the beginning), then it's Christmas and we are back in the house and bitching about leaks and stopped up sinks, then we're getting a dog. She spends all of 7 pages on Mardi Gras season, post-Katrina, and never really calls it that. She rides a float and hates the royalty balls. Too many story lines! Too many directions! Not enough focus! Did I mention that she bashes the mayor again and again, but never calls him by his name?? But has no qualms about naming the governor outright. I guess her editor was too busy snacking, as well, to catch these issues with this book.

I really really wanted to like this book and give it a generous 3 stars because Reed is indeed a good reporter and can make you laugh. However, I can only wonder what the original manuscript was like (it was on her laptop which was stolen when someone broke in). She should have taken that as here cue to just blog about New Orleans and her house, instead of publishing it.