555: a new series wherein i write exactly 555 words on a cultural object or happening. send me your requests/recommendations:
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“‘Tell me about your breakdowns. That’s what we’re all about down here,’ he said. ‘Breakdowns.’” — Nancy Lemann, Lives of the Saints
Certain books, like certain people and places, are fated. They arrive in layered ways. They stay and stay. Nancy Lemann’s Lives of the Saints (1985) is a book of breakdowns and fate. After finishing, I immediately recommended it to a friend, and he told me he’d already recommended it to me the month prior. I’d forgotten. Still, the words must’ve lodged in my body, as I sought the book out and it devoured me. Devoured me like the state of Louisiana its events breakdown inside of did so many years ago. The narrator, appropriately named Louise, has come home. Home is New Orleans, Louisiana, and the story opens with a wedding. Voices gossip, speak of breakdowns and breakups. The South in general, and New Orleans in particular, is a place in Lives of the Saints far from the center, “far from that hub of the universe along the East Coast.” A reservoir, an unconscious, a spreading edge overflowing with
