An imitation of neutrality.

You may celebrate, but only here.

To have no firm political stance is a privilege. To say you “don’t like politics,” to live passively, to let others make choices for you; it’s all rooted in comfort. When you don’t have to worry about your existence being debated in courtrooms, you have the luxury of disengagement. But when you’re born mestiza, when your family is made up of immigrants, when you’re a queer woman, you don’t get to ignore what’s happening around you. Politics aren’t an optional topic for the dinner table, it’s something that impacts the way we live.

In some ways, the city of New Orleans embodies that same passivity. It’s a blue dot in a sea of red. It’s full of people from different backgrounds, ethnicities, economic classes, yet they all are able to come together in a way that outshines their differences. But it also hides a more complicated reality: a place that doesn’t address what’s broken until it becomes impossible to ignore.

New Orleans takes things as they come. That’s part of its charm and also part of its curse. The laid-back, “let it ride” energy may bring people together on Bourbon Street, but it doesn’t push for change when change is needed most. It delays hard conversations. It lets injustices float by with a drink in hand and a shrug in the middle of a hurricane.

Maria—In Action!

During our Creole cookery class with Maria Vieages, we heard stories that revealed this pattern of quiet resignation. Maria’s restaurant was flooded during Katrina, in a disaster where she neither received support from her insurance or FEMA. Her accompanying chef recounted how her own restaurant and condo were wiped out in Hurricane Ida, and she’s never been able to reopen. These weren’t just natural disasters—they were human failures. Failures of systems that were supposed to help people rebuild, that instead left them stranded, left with the stories of heartache but not of support and recovery.

As tourists, we hear these stories and say, “What a pity.” We feel sympathy, maybe even anger, but then we move on. For the people who live here, though, the shrugging continues. “What a pity” becomes policy. The suffering is acknowledged, but nothing is done.

This kind of indifference is echoed in A Confederacy of Dunces. In the opening pages, Ignatius J. Reilly finds himself in an altercation with Officer Mancuso, who attempts to detain him without cause. The scuffle is an attraction of sorts, with “the crowd turning into something of a mob” (pg. 5). As easily as people are quick to tell Mancuso to get his hand off of Ignatius, it turns when Ignatius tells his mother that an old man, Claude Robichaux, defending him was actually the provocateur of the incident, ending in Robichaux’s arrest.

Yes, Robichaux is eventually released. But the damage is done, and no real accountability is taken. Mancuso isn’t seen for the officer trying to fulfill a quota. The crowd never got to see Robichaux’s name be cleared. The system just resets. No one learns anything.

Thee Ignatius Reilly.

This isn’t a one-off event in the novel; it’s the foundation of it. Passivity permeates every character. Mrs. Reilly knows she’s spoiled her son and made a man-baby out of him but does nothing to repair her mistakes. Gus Levy, the head of Levy Pants, watches his company collapse with mild curiosity but doesn’t intervene. Ignatius might be delusional, but at least he acts. Everyone else is content to sit still, to accept their circumstances, to wait for someone else to fix it. Ignatius is the power to act, to create change, but those around him are passive, only able to watch instead of taking that power.

That passive attitude isn’t just fictional. I see that passivity around me now. There are people who would rather not watch while immigrants are ripped away from their children. There are people who would rather say that we steal jobs, instead of realizing that they would never stand in the sun for twelve hours picking strawberries. But worst of all, I see a sea of silence in people who know better but choose to say nothing. he ones who don’t want to “get political,” who think doing their research is too much work, who claim neutrality as if it’s a virtue.

And it's not just white Americans who remain silent. I know many people of color who choose to look away. It’s especially painful when I see it in my own community, among Latinos who feel caught between two worlds.

When you’re born to parents of immigrants in a land that is not theirs, you are born with a target on your back. You have to speak before others speak for you, because what they say might erase you completely. And yet I’ve seen many first-generation Latino-Americans turn their backs on activism, on community, on culture. I’ve seen them assimilate so well they forget where they came from.

An ideology that many first-generation Latino-Americans identify can be summed up with the phrase “ni de aqui, ni de alla”. In a sense, our assimilation into culture becomes diffused from the moment our parents came here. We are fragments of two cultures, often fluent in neither. I know people who barely speak Spanish, or who are ashamed to speak English with an accent. . For many of these people, it is hard to take a stance on the issues happening currently, because although their parents or grandparents fought for the chance at a better life in the United States, they are scared. They do not want to come off as too much of either side; they do not raise their culture’s flags, or say that they support the president, because they are made up of both things. It is easier to assimilate to one culture, either American or Latino, because we live in fear of persecution from either side.

This fear of being “too much” or “not enough” paralyzes many of us. We try to blend in, to avoid criticism, to be invisible. And in doing so, we become silent when we need to be loud. We keep our heads down while the world decides who we are and what we’re worth.

The backlash we face comes from both sides. On the Latino side, we’re mocked for not being “Latino enough.” ‘Tienes cara de nopal, como no puedes hablar español?’ It comes in mockery of not being Latino enough, of not knowing what it was like to be raised in the country of your people, of not being able to roll your r’s or saying a word in English because you don’t know its Spanish equivalent. From the American side, you are exotic, or you are hated. Your skin is naturally tan, or too dark. It tells you that your authentic food, not just tacos or the Chipotle they think is authentic, is disgusting. Your heritage is “illegal.” The struggle and sacrifice your family endured to be here means nothing to people who think immigration is just a matter of paperwork and patience. . For many of those people who judge us, it becomes as simple as this: your family is full of illegal aliens. They should come here the right way, the way that is infinitely costly and inaccessible to many of us.

This is why choosing no side is not neutrality; it’s surrender. It is the illusion of respectability. It is the path of least resistance in a world that already resists you. We don’t get to be silent. We don’t get to wait for someone else to fix it.

New Orleans may dance through the pain. It may find joy in chaos. But until it demands more, hurricanes, both natural and political, will keep coming.

What They Want You To Remember.

There is an idea of White Southernism that is deeply painful. It lingers like a ghost—intangible, omnipresent, and unwilling to fade. In my own head, I struggle to understand how it could ever have been an acceptable way of life. It isn’t just about culture or tradition. It’s about a way of thinking, a legacy built on oppression, and the longing for a version of America that many would rather forget—or, worse, return to.

In New Orleans, you don’t see that ideology quite as clearly. The city feels like an island in the state of Louisiana, one of the most conservative places in the country. Driving through Grand Isle, I saw Trump 2024 flags on houses, on trucks, on hats, as if they were family crests. It was an unmistakable reminder: at its core, Louisiana is still very red. Yet New Orleans feels different. It’s messy and colorful and chaotic in a way that feels alive. It's a place where people of all shades live out loud, where history weighs heavy but where culture still finds ways to celebrate itself. It doesn’t feel like the rest of the state.

Visiting the Whitney Plantation was the moment the fantasy peeled away. I’ve never been in a place so steeped in grief. The land feels like it’s still breathing. Still mourning. You walk the grounds and imagine the people who lived and died there—not lived, exactly, but survived for as long as their bodies held out. Enslaved people born into brutality, dying in anonymity, never knowing what it felt like to rest inside the house they labored to maintain. Never knowing the comfort of being seen as human.

What’s nearly impossible to grasp is the perspective of the white people who did live inside that house. Who dined on the porch, entertained guests in high-ceilinged parlors, and passed laws that treated human beings like livestock. And yet, part of being a “worldly person” is trying to understand all angles of history. I tried. I stood in that main house, looked out the windows, and tried to imagine how someone could rationalize that kind of cruelty. But it is difficult to try and empathize with people who fought so hard to keep others beneath them. The mental gymnastics required to call it “heritage” instead of the horror it actually is. And in visiting the Confederate Memorial Hall, I did not last more than five minutes.

My mind raced with a single thought: These men would have hated me. They would have hated my existence, hated my parents for daring to have me into this country, hated the sacrifices my family made to create a better life here. That kind of hate leaves residue. And yet these men are preserved in glass cases, celebrated with medallions and plaques. But for what? For defending the right to enslave others? For fighting to keep families like mine from ever finding footing here?

What’s ironic is that in the end, they all wanted the same thing: the American Dream. The plantation owner, the immigrant father crossing the Rio Grande, the modern white conservative who fears a changing America. They all want some version of security, stability, meaning. But only some people were ever allowed to pursue that dream freely.

In reading ‘The Moviegoer’, I found it much simpler to read than the other books in this course. However, what makes it so simple? It, superficially, reads as a white man who has everything seeking some greater purpose, something that will make him whole. You want Binx to comply, to do as his Aunt Emily advises, to settle into being an adult at his grown age of twenty-nine. But he doesn’t, and what becomes clear is that even within privilege, there’s a kind of desperation. The desire for meaning is universal.

That’s what the White South tries to sell: the promise of meaning through order. It’s an idyllic picture of smiling families, sweet tea on porches, men with careers and women in pearls. A world of roles that fit just right. A world where everyone knows their place. But it’s a fantasy that comes at someone else’s suffering.

As society evolves, that picture becomes harder to maintain. The White South adapts, just like everything else. From the days of men going to college and women staying home, to now where both can pursue higher education, yet are still corralled into gendered roles. College becomes a rite of passage where you’re told to find yourself, only to be expected to shrink again immediately after.

For those clinging to that past, they see a threat in people who refuse to shrink. They see the rise of people of color as a reason their world is falling apart. In their minds, the system was perfect until “others” disrupted it. And so, they fight for that illusion to return. They dream of summer homes on the water, staff they don’t have to pay much, and wealth that feels earned simply by existing. It’s about comfort, not justice.

And that’s what makes it dangerous. That’s why you see such vitriol in conservative rhetoric. The outrage over immigration, the obsession with crime, the myths about stolen jobs; they all stem from fear. Not always hatred, though it often becomes that. But fear, fear of being irrelevant, of losing the privileges their ancestors bled to protect. Fear of looking in the mirror and not recognizing the country they thought was theirs alone.

What they forget is that their ancestors were immigrants too. That they were once called slurs. That they were once chased out of towns. They forget that the American Dream has never belonged to one group, and it never will.

In some aspect, it’s almost a form of escapism. While Binx uses movies and women to temporarily forget his woes, modern white southerners fight for a semblance of power to free themselves from the lack of control in their lives. They are scared of the progress because it is unfamiliar, they are scared of the rise of people of color because it is unfamiliar. They want the romantic life, the stoic one that asks for no more because it already has everything. They want to listen to jazz on Bourbon, without remembering how it came about. They want to have their weddings on plantation homes, without remembering the suffering that has taken place. They want to get into their dream schools, without remembering how displaced and stifled the people of color in America have been. They want to return to a world that was picked by them, without remembering that there are others surrounding them. They want to live in a version of America that is perfectly curated to their comfort.

But comfort is not truth. And comfort is not justice.

All week, I’ve checked my phone and seen headlines from Los Angeles—my home. I recall these Southerners, who wave their Trump flags high, who wish for a return in white pride, and wonder what they would think of me. What would they think of my mother, who immigrated here when she was ten from Guatemala? What would they think of my father, who immigrated when he was seventeen from Mexico? Would they even care that my father spent two days on foot, swimming through the Rio Grande with no material possessions, just to make it to El Paso? Was he wrong for wanting more for himself, for his future?

I know families who would have it worse than me. I am an adult, and an only child, so I would be the only one to take care of myself without my father. But there are families with children who are all citizens, children who would be completely displaced by their parents being banished and labeled as criminals. This was supposed to be about New Orleans, but I cannot make it about anything else.

What once was.

You’ll never understand a city unless you’re from there.

This is how I view tourism—and even the people who move to a city in their twenties, and end up staying. You can visit every iconic location, stroll through the streets, or pause at memorials. But you’ll never fully understand the place, not like someone who was born there. You don’t have anyone buried in the Lafayette Cemetery, or any ancestors who were related to the plantations you visit. In a perverse way, it turns you into a voyeur of pain, consuming history without being a part of it.

Reading The Yellow House by Sarah Broom helped me understand New Orleans through her eyes: a city shaped by memory, loss, and rootedness. Before our group had officially visited East New Orleans and the Ninth Ward, I had gone to a nail appointment with a girl who lived in the Lower Ninth Ward. It was early in the morning, an eight-a.m. appointment, but the air was still thick with the humidity I’ve come to associate with Louisiana. The initial impression of emptiness felt normal: it was Sunday, and extremely early, so I’d just assumed that it was normal. However, on the second visit, the emptiness stuck with me.

A call to action.

We spent the previous week immersed in the bold, bright culture of Bourbon Street and the well-preserved historical districts. But on that ‘tour’, I felt the stark divide. This city was not mine. It belonged to those born here, and to those buried here.

I recognize that feeling. Raised in South Central Los Angeles, I’ve seen the changes. I remember the Village before it became USC Village, when it was University Village. There was a Superior Grocers, a movie theater, and a Baskin Robbins where my madrina always ordered strawberry ice cream in a waffle cup. The Pollo Loco where I got French fries is now a Northern Café. I’ve watched University Gateway shops morph from an abandoned lot to a rotating cast of failed businesses—an overpriced minimalist grocery store, to a CREAM that didn’t last a year, and a sushi place that became a Dunkin' Donuts.

By my junior and senior year of high school, I was walking past homes on 36th Place that were being replaced by bulky apartment complexes for students, buildings with no parking and no connection to the community. The abandoned house behind mine became one of those complexes. And the irony is I never left, so I cannot be so shocked that it’s changed. I’ve stayed, but the changes weren’t made for people like me.

That disconnect, that sense of exclusion, feels even sharper in New Orleans. In both cities, you can measure how much the city “cares” by how well it maintains its streets. In Cudahy, where my cousin grew up, the sidewalks are broken, and the roots of trees push up through the concrete. Accessibility is an afterthought. East New Orleans is no different; overgrown lots where homes used to be, cracked roads that left me carsick, streets that feel forgotten.

What remains of The Yellow House.

It feels selfish to ask why no one has done anything. But eventually, you realize: maybe no one with power ever intended to. The people who live there don’t have the resources or influence to demand better. And when you’re fighting just to get by, there’s no energy left for hope. It’s easier to invest in what’s already thriving than to help the communities that have been abandoned.

In tourist areas of New Orleans, you hardly see any trash. IV Waste trucks roll through, spraying lemon-scented cleaning agents. But step into New Orleans East, and the illusion vanishes. You’re met with cracked sidewalks and scattered garbage. The money that flows into the city isn’t for the people, but for the image. It’s for those who visit, not those who live. The hurricanes stripped so much from these neighborhoods, and no one came to help pick up the pieces. You can see who had to give up after the hurricanes that have occurred here, who had little support in picking up the pieces. Residents were left to rebuild on their own until that, too, became too much. And then, they left.

What remains of Jazzland/Six Flags New Orleans.

That’s the cruelest part. Change makes people feel like they no longer belong. When everything around you shifts, it’s hard to find your place. There is pain in remembering what used to be. When you watch everything around you change, you wonder what your place is anymore. You leave, and the next time you return, the city feels less familiar. The nostalgia that kept you tied there fades. You try to hold on to what you remember, but it flickers like a flame, merging into something new and unrecognizable—a body you no longer see as your own.

My dad raised me alone, hiring a babysitter to take me to school from age four to thirteen. He’d wake up at four in the morning, drive me thirty minutes south down Vermont to her house, and I’d nap for another hour before she got me ready. We’d watch Despierta America as she brushed my hair into a ponytail, and we’d leave by 6:30 a.m. so I could be on time—she didn’t drive, but sometimes her husband would take us and even treat me to Jack in the Box if we had time.

Unlike Broom, I didn’t feel shame in that journey; it felt like a privilege not to be on the 204 for an hour. But I understand her discomfort. The private school she attended left the impression of a place she did not belong her; “We seem, in our car and in our lot, not the match the school to which I now belong.” This is how I feel about the ‘new’ that is coming to Los Angeles—the sleek apartments, the expensive restaurants. None of it was made with my community in mind. It makes people feel like outsiders in their own neighborhoods. Like we should be ashamed for not keeping up.

Vampiros de cultura.

After a few days of rest and relaxation in Grand Isle, our little group of bookpackers arrived in the New Orleans’ Central Business District, settling into our hotel rooms. Despite its nickname, “The Big Easy”, I’ve found very little about it to be easy so far.

I’m used to the organized chaos of Los Angeles; the ruckus of a melting pot. I know which bus will take me where, how to navigate the streets depending on which neighborhood I’m in, and where to go for a cheap meal nearby.

Maybe that’s why I feel so disoriented in New Orleans; it reminds me too much of Downtown LA. The unfamiliar morphs into the mundane with the snap of your fingers. There’s the unhoused sleeping on the sidewalks, and thick, warm air that you can’t quite escape. Both cities seem caught in the cycle of appealing to the ‘newcomers’: cafes with no prices listed, hotels plopped next to one another, shops that appeal to the niche of the city. However, being born and raised in Los Angeles confirms my belief that my city is being gentrified, I’m not quite sure if New Orleans has always been this way.

Eating out while staying in a hotel for three weeks is not for the cheapskates, such as I. Nearly every meal so far has cost me $20. This is more than I’d hope, but there seems to be an unspoken rule when it comes to being a tourist and spending without hesitation. You’re not just buying food; you’re paying for an experience you may never have again. That’s not too bad, as I have been personally victimized by the Hailey Bieber smoothie, but it adds up when you’re not working during this trip.

When you go somewhere as a tourist short-term, there’s a different level of control than when you’re a long-term tourist. It’s easy to spend because you don’t know when you’ll be back; you need all the memorabilia and will eat all the local food. You become aware of the façade. The urgency to collect souvenirs or eat ‘authentically’ fades into a quieter realization: it’s all available, over and over, from the ‘I Heart NOLA’ shirts to the beignets. The city wants you to spend, to believe in the illusion it casts. That’s the American cycle of tourism. You’re never just seeing a place—you’re consuming it. 

This awareness surprisingly came to me before we had officially arrived in New Orleans, while on the Cajun Pride Swamp Tour. The tour guide, who was friendly and full of jokes, pulled out the tour’s big showstopper: a baby alligator, who was to be passed around for anyone on the tour to ‘pet’. Its mouth was bound with what seemed like a bandage, safe for any liabilities and ready to take pictures with, like a party favor.  As our boat wound through the seemingly endless swamp, he called into the trees at every stop with a startling “AY-YUP”, summoning the conditioned wildlife with treats. Racoons, boars, and gators came out of nowhere to feast upon fistfuls of marshmallow and dried corn, all urbanized versions of themselves. Everyone there was trying to get something out of the other; the tour guide hoping to make some tips with his story telling, us tourists who wanted to immerse ourselves in the culture, and even the animals hoping to be fed. Perhaps we have not inherently caused interference with the animals’ way of life, but we’ve fed into it. We have smiled ear to ear, ooh’ed and ahh’ed at the creatures, held the baby gator, who was separated from his mother, while having our picture taken. As tourists, we are feeding into the economy that lets opportunities like this continue.

In this system, we are complicit. Our wonder feeds the machine. In Interview with The Vampire, Louis reflects, “Never in New Orleans had the kill to be disguised. The ravages of fever, plague, crime—these things competed with us always there, and outdid us.” Just as he fed on humans, tourists feed on the curated versions of local culture. The city does the same thing, needing to thrive on tourism and in doing so reducing the value of its culture. Louis saw New Orleans as a place where he could disappear, where horror mixed with beauty in a way that hid his darkness in plain sight. He was invisible because the city made room for monsters, because it had already learned to sell its suffering.

New Orleans, like LA, confuses origin with invention. In LA, I know what cultures shape the city—Latino and Asian communities have built it, and the American version has diffused it. Here, the history is more entangled: French, Spanish, African, Creole. Colonialism left its fingerprints everywhere, from architecture to cuisine. Maybe that’s why fast food seems strangely absent. You’re meant to eat gumbo, po’boys, and beignets. If you don’t, you’re “not doing it right.” You’re not consuming correctly.

As a group, we’ve been to various places north of the Mississippi River, yet not too north as to meet the lake. I cannot say I know New Orleans, because I have yet to know all of it. This is how I feel about people who have ‘visited’ Los Angeles; you do not know Los Angeles if you haven’t traveled South of the 10, or East of the 110.  

Louis’s love for New Orleans was always conditional, even if he does not acknowledge it. He could admire its decadence without ever being a part of it. The city cannot love him because it does not know him; if it did, it would reject him. Tourists enjoy the city the same way Louis does: from a distance. We don’t get to know the full truth, only the filtered version that we can tell friends and family about. We crave intimacy without responsibility.  

Perhaps, like Louis, we too are feeding off this place—its food, its stories, its tragedies polished into spectacle. The city dances for us, and we smile for photos. And when we leave, it will reset for the next group, the next “easy” experience. But nothing here is easy, not for the people, or the gators, or the culture.

Skip the preface.

Novel introductions are the cuckolds of the literary universe.

There is no greater joy than walking into a bookstore and picking up a new book. You find yourself excited at the prospect of something new, something you have yet to fully synthesize and digest. You’re at the threshold of a new understanding. You flip past the first few pages, still crisp and containing the aroma of ‘new book’, ignoring the copyright page and all the things that come before that first paragraph of text. You’ve gone through the foreplay—browsing the store, observing the covers, picking your poison. You reach the first real page, the one that contains substantial paragraphs, but find that it isn’t the novel itself. It’s the introduction.

That always ruins it for me.

My trauma with novel introductions began with David Cronenberg’s introduction to Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. I picked it up at the Downtown Central Library during my junior year of high school, not in preparation for any exam or class, but to understand literature that people called ‘classic’. Less than two pages into the introduction, Cronenberg spoiled the ending. In that instant, my sense of wonder, sprouted from the ambiguity and possibility of unfolding the text’s meaning, had disappeared. It turned the novel into a sterile text that I knew the points to.

Since that moment, I’ve refused to read introductions, especially when it comes to the classics.

That rule remained firm when I picked up The Awakening at Barnes & Noble, alongside the rest of the books required for the Maymester, in Santa Monica. The knowledge I had of Kate Chopin was limited from my work as a teaching assistant. Each school semester, I help prepare my class of seniors for their AP English Literature exams. One of our recurring texts is Chopin’s short story, The Kiss. The students are tasked with reading and annotating the story, then writing a thesis that responds to a prompt regarding the story. Yet, because the class only meets twice a month, and the grade they receive only impacts their standing in the program, I get the absolutely worst theses that don’t make any sense as to what is occurring in the actual story.

When I first exited the Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport—or MSY, as I prefer to call it—with our group, I was hit with a wave of heavy, sickly heat. It was a reminder that summer had started, though I suppose that my Los Angeles upbringing had skewed my sense of what ‘summer’ felt like. As a late summer baby, you’d believe I’d love, or at least be used to, the heat. I grew up in apartments with subpar insulation that stops the cool air from the summer nights from coming in, making my home feel like an oven at night.

That morning, I had left home in a thick USC sweatshirt and black leggings, believing that I was capable of withstanding the under 90-degree heat of Louisiana. That frigid LA morning hadn’t prepared me for the smothering air. Arriving almost an hour later than scheduled, which had ruined the Houston Airport for me, I realized I was not prepared for what came next: a three-hour car ride with a pile of suitcases that preferred to topple over my head at every turn instead of remaining in a neat stack.

Still, I found myself unable to sleep on the ride. I watched Louisiana slowly transform from city to swamp, so unlike LA’s endless loop of houses, shops, and freeways. This place shifted from urban density into a raw rural landscape. The roads weren’t crowded with impatient drivers, not the ones that were too stupid to move forward and willing to hit you with their cars. There was space, stillness.

On our first full day at Grand Isle, we were given our first simple task: finish two thirds of The Awakening by the end of the day and finish it by our 5 p.m. seminar the next day. Here we were, surrounded by beach, tranquility, and the endless possibilities given by a new environment. You get so wrapped up in trying to experience Grand Isle and the limited time there that your brain tries to tell you to go, step on the beach, and get to know the people around you. But time was limited, and we all knew we had to read it.

Reading the novel in Grand Isle added an odd sense of dissonance. I struggled to map the novel’s world onto my own surroundings. Edna Pontellier’s Grand Isle was slow and romantic, painting a picture of pleasant summer evenings on the warm beach. The one I saw was cluttered with red seaweed that made you anxious to step on it, containing bits of washed-up garbage, and dense clouds that could almost trick you into believing that outside couldn’t possibly be that hot. The air was thick, unrelenting, enveloping you the second you stepped out of an air-conditioned space. No possibility of an Amazon delivery, or a quick bite at McDonald’s unless you wanted to drive 50 minutes away.

And yet, despite the environmental disconnect, I connected with Edna. I resisted the urge to look up a summary. Normally, I can’t help myself; if a movie or book moves slowly or is filled with flowery language, I will open the Wikipedia page without a second thought. But I held back. Edna’s internal state, her longing, her desire for complete autonomy—I knew it. While on Grand Isle, every day felt like I was waiting for something that never came, something that would propel me out of la-la-land and had me unable to fully relax. But it never did, regardless of that itch for transformation.

In Edna, I found myself enveloped by her similar feelings for longing and belonging, outside of my space in Grand Isle. It was the hope that you’d wake up and feel different, that your achievements would not only make you feel better but transform what you knew as life. That desperate desire for some accomplishment, some shift, that rewards you with the kind of happiness you’ve been looking for.

And somehow, this reminded me of why I don’t read introductions. I don’t want someone else’s interpretation shaping what I’m about to feel. I want the characters, the language, the setting, to meet me where I am. Knowing information and context about the author and the time in which the story was published is important to the understanding of the novel, but I don’t need it shoved and synthesized down my throat before I’ve read the first sentence. The Awakening didn’t need an introduction. It just needed space to reach me.