Barrelhouse Reviews: Nola Face by Brooke Champagne
Reviewed by Nola O’Donnell
The University of Georgia Press / April 2024 / 174 pp
Brooke Champagne’s memoir-in-essays Nola Face: A Latina’s Life in the Big Easy stuns with humor, raw honesty, and stylistic ingenuity. Through its inventive structure, Champagne doesn’t just recount her past—she interrogates it, exposing the ways stories shift depending on who tells them, to whom, and why.
The book is arranged in three sections, each playing with the motif of "Two Truths and a Lie," a game that becomes an apt metaphor for the slipperiness of memory and how we curate our own pasts. This structure allows Champagne to experiment with form, moving between traditional first-person narration and more fragmented and imaginative approaches.
Take “Exercises,” for example, an essay that retells the same event (an unfortunate one involving the narrator and her husband, Brock Guthrie, walking in on her father masturbating) over and over, each time in a different style—Anecdote, Drunk, Cross-Examination, and more. In the British Gothic version, she writes, “So Mr. Champagne listened to Mr. Guthrie’s mournful words; hours later, perchance within the witching hour, he fled the house, never to return.” Thus “Mr. Guthrie” becomes part of the story’s dramatic reframing. In the Apostrophe version, however, she adopts an almost Biblical tone: “Thy father, hunched over, member in hand, one sock pulled high, the other’s errant elasticity amassed around his ankles the night in question, lo those many years ago.” The juxtaposition of grandiose language with deeply awkward subject matter showcases Champagne’s comedic precision—how a shift in voice can turn the same event from tragic to absurd to mythic.
The essays range in tone from darkly comic to profoundly meditative, blending personal anecdotes with cultural critique. One of the collection’s most striking elements is its treatment of language. Raised in a bilingual household, Champagne navigates the different codes and expectations that come with speaking Spanish and English. This linguistic duality is more than just a practical reality; it becomes a site of power struggles, affection, and, at times, erasure. Some essays explore the delicate negotiations that take place in translation—both literal and emotional—between family members who do not fully understand one another, whether due to linguistic barriers or deeper ideological divides. These moments reflect Champagne’s larger preoccupation with the gaps between perception and reality, between what is said and what is meant.
In “Nice Lady,” she examines her own discomfort in narrating a violent encounter (a carjacking by two Black men in Baton Rouge), grappling with how her recounting of the story shifts depending on her audience. The essay lays bare the complexities of self-narrative, exposing the tensions between lived experience and the sociopolitical forces that shape our storytelling. It calls attention to how one’s identity can influence the telling of personal histories and highlights the subtle biases that may alter the way such narratives are received.
Meanwhile, "McCleaning with the Dustbuster," critiques the superficial solutions people seek in relationships, using household appliances as metaphors for her mother's failed marriages. Champagne reflects on her mother's purchase of a Tri-Star vacuum cleaner during her second divorce, and contrasts it with memories of a Dustbuster. She writes, “Dusting is the minutiae of moving objects around. So is marriage and, sometimes, so is divorce,” highlighting how relationships can feel like repetitive, surface-level tasks. The essay critiques gender roles and emphasizes that real, sustained effort is necessary for meaningful relationships, rejecting easy fixes in favor of confronting deeper conflicts. Where battery-powered solutions promise mobility and ease, Champagne argues that love’s real work requires plugged-in persistence—the kind of unwavering suction that doesn’t fade when the charge runs low or when the mess runs deeper than surface debris.
Perhaps one of the most heartfelt and stylistically daring pieces, “Push,” opens with a single sprawling sentence, mimicking the breathlessness and intensity of childbirth. Champagne seamlessly weaves recollection, sensory detail, and introspection, allowing the reader to experience the overwhelming rush of the moment alongside her. The essay begins with the chaotic juxtaposition of a hospital room where a birth is happening and a Code Silver—meaning an active shooter—blares over the intercom. This disorienting collision of life and danger mirrors the tension that runs through much of Nola Face: the concurrent forces of creation and destruction. The piece, much like the collection as a whole, delineates and interweaves the complexities of memory, storytelling, and identity formation—moments of profound personal significance unfolding amid larger cultural and political turmoil. The birthing scene becomes not just a physical event but a reflection of the tensions between survival and vulnerability, control and chaos.
Throughout the collection, Champagne’s narratives challenge the very notion of truth and explore how we construct our identities through the stories we choose to tell. The games of memory and misremembering at play here reflect larger cultural truths that are often more difficult to pin down than they initially appear. As she observes in “Three Sacraments,” “Some truths are too large for a single story to hold, so we break them into pieces and call them memories.” Shifting gears in “The Case for ‘Cunt,’” Champagne delves into the reclamation of language and the ways in which societal taboos shape our understanding of both the body and identity. Her exploration of the word, in all its variations, highlights how language can be a site of both oppression and liberation, further complicating our understanding of the self and our place within the world. As Champagne puts it: “I want it to astonish and scare, to comfort and cajole. I want to not give a fuck who likes if we use it or not.”
Champagne’s deftness with language allows her to seamlessly weave together personal reflection, cultural analysis, and social critique. She presents her readers with a narrative that doesn’t offer easy answers or neat resolutions. Instead, she forces us to confront the messiness of memory, identity, and cultural belonging. Nola Face’s essays, using dark humor and an unflinching stance, examine how memory, identity, and language collide to form the selves we present to the world. This collection recognizes the instability of truth, invites discomfort, and artfully persuades readers to question their assumptions.
Nola O’Donnell grew up in Boston, earned her BA in English from Suffolk University, and is currently an MA candidate in Prose Fiction at the University of East Anglia. She writes best in pajamas. This is her first publication.