Monique Truong's new novel is The Sweetest Fruits.From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:
Q: You note that "sugar and cornbread led me to Lafcadio Hearn." At what point did you decide to write a novel about him?--Marshal Zeringue
A: I first read about Hearn in a Southern foodways encyclopedia--I was fact-checking my second novel Bitter in the Mouth in which I wrote that traditionally Northerners added sugar to their cornbread recipes, while Southerners did not--and I saw an entry on Hearn that included a brief sketch of his life including his contribution to Southern food--he's credited with writing the first Creole cookbook in the U.S.--and almost instantaneously I decided to write about him.
The first hook for me was that he had written a cookbook. I think of food writers as a tribe apart and very much my tribe. I feel that we look at the world through a particular set of lenses, and by lenses I mean bowls, dishes, glasses.
The second hook for me was that Hearn was a consummate traveler and an immigrant twice over. As a former refugee and someone who now often writes far from home, I also consider migratory people to be part of my tribe. I was also intrigued that Hearn in 1890 had chosen East over West (Japan over the U.S.), the reverse of...[read on]