Growing up, Nina LaCour loved listening to her family tell stories about their past. Her grandparents had migrated from New Orleans to Long Beach to escape Jim Crow, and New Orleans felt like a “mythical place.” But she also was fascinated by her family’s history in Los Angeles: one relative became the first Black superintendent of a Columbia record plant; another, who was light enough to pass for white but “was outspoken about his race,” moved into a new development and had a showdown with a nakedly racist neighbor. Los Angeles was a city “both of opportunity and a place where they still faced some of the problems they had in New Orleans.”
That backdrop is the inspiration for “Meet Me in the Garden,” a sweeping historical novel that is also incredibly intimate and personal. The book starts during World War II in New Orleans and goes up past the Watts riots in 1965. “I started with my family history and branched out from there,” LaCour said in a recent video interview from her home in San Francisco.
LaCour drew on the stories she heard growing up, family interviews and detailed research, whether it was into the medical records of family members institutionalized in Louisiana or street maps of L.A. in the 1940s to find specific details. “My dad grew up in Compton and I had his impressions but he was a kid so I scoured the incredible archives of The California Eagle, the Black newspaper that documented a lot about the area,” says LaCour, who was a successful writer of young adult novels before her well-reviewed adult novel debut in 2022, “Yerba Buena.”
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The book follows Odette, the youngest of the Honore sisters, on her journey from New Orleans to Los Angeles and from her teen years to parenthood. Her cousin and best friend, Delphine, has gotten pregnant by a white man and left for Los Angeles, where she passes as white and cuts off everyone from her past. Her sisters, Adele and Claire, are both married, and they pressure Odette, who is secretly in a passionate relationship with a woman, to get married before they move to Los Angeles.
While the marriage is short-lived, and Odette loves her son and later her adopted daughter, she must constantly suppress her desire to live openly as a lesbian with the love of her full family life — LaCour fleshes out more than half a dozen other characters in Odette’s circle.
LaCour contemplated incorporating real-life family tragedies. “But I realized it made the book too sad. I don’t have to be so beholden to the truth. I can do what I want and give my characters a happier ending.”
LaCour will be at Bel Canto Books with her father, Jacques, to discuss “Meet Me in the Garden” in Long Beach at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 11.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. Did you set out to write a novel about the exploration of self and identity or did that emerge with the characters?
I knew I’d be writing about a lesbian in the ’50s, so it would be an issue. But I didn’t know in the beginning how I was going to treat it or what the actual conflict and stakes would be. That came as I figured out how important of a role that the children would play and how much love there is among the family members; those bonds are so vital, so the stakes for Odette became huge and the sacrifice it would take in order to be able to raise her children and remain in her family. Then I realized much of it was going to be about the tension of concealing or not concealing and when it was all right to take a risk.
Q. There are numerous issues surrounding race, gender, sexual orientation and even labor unions that all involve the characters’ lack of agency in how they live their lives. Were you conscious of that connection?
Setting a book then, I was really aware of that and wondered what it would be like to be these specific people when society functioned that way. The constraints of societal expectations bring about so many of the conflicts in the novel; it made for tension inherent to the lives of these people who don’t exactly fit the mold that society wants them to.
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Q. People nurture their souls and express themselves through art, music and reading novels, but also through cooking, clothing and home design, which you pay a lot of attention to. Why was that important?
Beauty in the world is such a source of pleasure and energy. Many women in the ’50s were limited to homemaking as their creative expression, and it could be an incredibly important form. The practice of incorporating creativity into our days and making beautiful things to share with one another or to have for ourselves keeps people going through tumultuous times. And it’s such a grounding force. So I wanted to give the same attention and respect to the reupholstering of a chair or making a special meal to more widely embraced forms of art, like music and painting. This book is very domestic in so many ways.
Q. But Odette also becomes a painter. What’s it like writing art into existence?
It was such a pleasure. I’m incredibly visual as a writer — I really see what I write about. And I spent five intense years on this book, so I was like in Odette’s perspective, in her life. It felt like I was creating the paintings, even though I was doing it with words instead of a paintbrush.
Q. Given all that the characters cope with, how important was it for you to surround Odette with love, hope and community from so many people?
When my grandmother and grandfather made the journey, so did their brothers and sisters and cousins, and they sent back for their parents. Several lived in the same neighborhood and on the same block. They’d help each other with their houses and eat and play cards together. A tight-knit community was really a lifeline for them. The family lived in Louisiana for well over a hundred years, so they gave up so much to have a better life, but they brought a lot with them and held onto it really tightly.
It also comes from recognizing the people in my life who continue to show up for me and how incredible that is. To spend life alongside people and see how you change and be there for one another is incredibly moving to me. And I wanted it to be so clear what Odette might lose if she came out to live more authentically. There’s so much at stake for her.
Q. When Odette finally tells her children the truth about herself and their own background, she still lies about some crucial things. Is she protecting herself or her kids?
I really wrestled with that decision, and I felt like her responsibility as a parent was both to be truthful and to protect them. Those seem to be at odds here, but to really parent somebody, sometimes, doesn’t mean sharing every single detail. Not telling everything, which might make things easier for her, is an ultimate act of love from Odette.
Q. You sound like you loved writing this book.
I did, but that’s not to say that I didn’t struggle. It was so intense, and I wrote many drafts. I started on my computer, and then I couldn’t write on the computer anymore. I bought these free-write contraptions to prevent distractions for a while, but then threw those away and wrote in notebooks. I’d go to SFMOMA to a video installation, and on every screen is a different musician. It’s dark, and it’s loud and plays on a loop, and I’d sit in the dark and write by hand.
But I fell in love with the lives of my characters and the comfort in this family. There was so much love. I just let them all be good people, no matter whether I agreed with them or if they’re misguided about things. It felt like a really special thing to give myself for all that time.
Q. Do you have a stronger sense of your roots now?
I spent more time in New Orleans than I ever had before — it’s not a huge part of the story, but it’s where they’re from. I felt so close to my family there. And I took the Sunset Limited train from New Orleans to L.A. It’s 48 hours, and the route is almost unchanged from when my grandparents rode it in the ’40s. I thought it was going to be very pretty, but it’s just Texas desert and completely barren, and I thought about them leaving everything they knew and not knowing where they’d end up. I have so much more appreciation for what they gave up and what they built. They built these very modest lives that were full of music and good food and family, and it’s beautiful.