Brooke Champagne’s Nola Face: A Latina’s Life in the Big Easy
Beautiful Tragedy and Intersectionality in Brooke Champagne’s Nola Face: A Review by Katelyn Allen
Brooke Champagne’s debut essay collection,Nola Face, is a book comprised of engaging contradictions. The stories it contains might be tragic, but they're also hilarious. The collection won Champagne the Silver Medalist award at the Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPYs) in Southern Nonfiction.
Champagne's essays have been selected as Notables in several editions of Best American Essays and have been honored with various awards, including the inaugural William Bradley Prize for the Essay. She won the 2022 March Faxness National Championship Essay Tournament with her essay on Aimee Mann’s cover of the song “One.” She's also the recipient of the 2023-2024 Alabama State Council on the Arts Literary Fellowship in Prose. Her work appears in Issue 17 of Miracle Monocle.
Champagne’s writing showcases true identity as a bold Latina raised in New Orleans and in the context of an even bolder family. Her essays reveal the small nuances that held her family together and worked to shape her personality. These pieces are powerful, yet sensitive; honest, yet obscure. Champagne pulls different parts of her identity into play and uses one to challenge the other. Her passion for writing in English, for example, is juxtaposed against her abuela’s attachment to Spanish. Champagne is white, but she's also Latina; she's a highly-educated individual, but also a passionate curser. Champagne has a talent for revealing core aspects of her identity through focused moments, pulling her readers through tragic memories, while also maintaining a humorous, self-deprecating tone.
In the very first essay of the book, Champagne lies to us. First, she tells us she will walk us through an exercise like the ones she does with her English students at the University of Alabama: two truths and a lie. Then she reveals that all three of the options she presented were true after all. Many of the writer's essays delve into her relationship with her Ecuadorian abuela, Lala, who taught her how to steal and "lie in translation."
Champagne’s essay "Exercises" perfectly encapsulates what her father’s love is like by way of a series of stylized re-tellings of an uncomfortable memory with her father. First she tells the story as an anecdote, then she tells it in a very series, British gothic tone; she breaks the discomfort by employing more playful styles, like a drunk re-telling to a friend as if the moment appeared in a telenovela. This strategy reveals the way in which getting to know the writer's father requires adadapting to different standards: you have to be OK with not knowing; you have to be able to make do with what he has given you; and often what he has given you is not much.
Champagne even criticizes herself in a section of "Cross Examination"in which an anonymous examiner—which I imagined to be Champagne’s intrusive thoughts—repeatedly questions the writer and implies that it was her fault for walking into a painful memory. The examiner asks: “Are you certain you want to know and share his stories in order to become closer as father and daughter, or, as a writer, are you trying to cannibalize him by creating this unique, interesting character?” This version of the writer's persona responds with "Fuck," to this very intense accusation.
Nola Face finds a way to make readers laugh while also delivering the most heart-wrenching memories. Champagne pushes readers into uncomfortable territory and then diffuses tension with self-deprecating jokes. Her writing style is the theme of Nola Face, comprised of the contradictions that define what Champagne calls "bugginess." It's about intersectionality, being who you are, and breaking away from the expectations attached to your identities.
More than just a great collection of essays, Nola Face is creative non-fiction that makes you laugh moments after inspiring tears. Every essay has the power to bring forth feelings of intense discomfort (I found myself cringing away from the painful memories that were similar to my own), but Champagne extinguishes the tension with humor. Nola Face inspired me to reflect upon my life and laugh the pain away after finding a lesson in the moment.
You can find your copy of Nola Face at The University of Georgia Press or your favorite local bookstore.