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Plenty Enough Suck To Go Around: A Memoir Of Floods, Fires, Parades, And Plywood (2009)

by Cheryl Wagner(Favorite Author)

3.77 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0806531037 (ISBN13: 9780806531038)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Citadel Press

review 1: As you might imagine, this memoir is pretty depressing. It's a Katrina memoir, written by a woman who's in the vicinity of my age group, and tells the story of her and her partner's endless, miserable work to clean and restore their flooded home. The question she keeps asking herself (besides "should we run like hell") is, can New Orleans ever be the community it was, or did it drown and rot away with the stinking flood waters?I really enjoyed the author's voice; it's not a funny story but she manages to infuse it with that quirky sensibility that makes New Orleans the one-of-a-kind melting pot it is. The only thing I didn't like was the abrupt ending, which wasn't an ending at all; I totally get the point, that the story was far from over and the work would go on and on,... more but it felt like the story needed some sort of thematic punctuation. I have to admit the thought of doing what Cheryl and Jake did (I assume they succeeded) baffles me. I would have been one of the first people to say "screw it" and move away and not come back. But then again, the people of NOLA have something other cities don't - it's hard to define, but I've seen it in every person I've met who once called the city home. When you feel that connected to a place I guess it's worth the flood sweat and tears. Anyway, if you want to know what life was *really* like in New Orleans after Katrina - written not as a horror story to exploit the suffering, but as an honest and gritty account of the months after a disaster when the rest of the world has moved on but your own home is still falling down - I highly recommend Plenty Enough Suck to Go Around.
review 2: Post-Katrina New Orleans from the point of view of someone who returned to repair and live in her flooded Mid-City home. Cheryl Wagner writes conversationally (she's a radio commentator) and very personally about the what it was like to return with her boyfriend to their almost-deserted neighborhood and to do the exhausting work--physical and emotional--of restoring their home. Reading this book made me realize the incredible amount of energy and commitment it would have taken to return to New Orleans after the storm. It made me wonder if I would have taken one look at the same house and concluded that it was beyond hope. (Probably.) Wagner's descriptions of New Orleans culture and her pre-storm life provide a framework for understanding why whe would choose to rebuild. To stay in New Orleans meant battling mold, rust, rotten drywall, rotten bureaucracy, rats & roaches, and as time went on, crime and violence in the disrupted neighborhood. The story is amazing and is told with humor, yet you can hear the pain throughout. An excellent "on-the-ground" version of post-Katrina New Orleans. less

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