Memoir details author’s search for self amidst competing identities

Early in Brooke Champagne’s childhood, her Ecuadorian grandmother strictly confined the girl’s present and future. She was to be beautiful but know precisely when to use it, rationalize in English but love in Spanish. Champagne’s betrayal of these confounding orders began before they were even spoken. She soon started writing and hiding the truth about who she was becoming.

In “Nola Face,” Champagne includes hilarious, heartbreaking essays in this collection to trace the evolutions of her girlhood of competing languages, ethnicities, aesthetics, politics and class constraints against the backdrop of a boozy New Orleans upbringing. On these pages, Champagne and her family love poorly and hate well, whip and get whipped, pray and curse in two languages, steal from The Man and give to themselves, kiss where it hurts and poke where it hurts worse, and keep and spill each other’s secrets. They believe, doubt and reckon with the stories they tell about themselves, becoming most human, most alive, in their connections to one another.