How Finding My Narrator Brought My Entire Book Together

My first night in the apartment where I’d moved after my marriage ended, I listened to my upstairs neighbor, a horticulturalist, dragging huge potted plants from one corner of her room to another. To relax, I drew the water in my tub and waited 5 minutes and then 10 and then more for it to turn hot. It never did. It wasn’t until after my frigid shower that I realized the hot and cold knobs had been switched.

When I finally went to bed, I lay down and stared at the ceiling, white with a few stray webs, and then shouted as my entire bed frame collapsed. For the rest of the year in that apartment, my mattress was on the floor, the frame’s ribs balanced around it. I didn’t want to give up on decor.

The apartment was filthy and unusual. (Of course, the unusual is the usual in New Orleans.) Sometimes, slugs would slime their way from behind the baseboards. The landlord usually rented the place to jockeys who’d pass through the city for a season. Outside, neighbors marked their parking spots with caution tape and orange cones. It was what I could afford.

The book needed more than my own voice. It needed an impresario.

That first weekend, I looked outside my room’s two windows, a luxury compared to the cavernous kitchen and living room. It wasn’t all that bad. A room, a view (sorta). Soon, though, the wall came alive—a colony of rustling and chirping, a frantic rodent argument.

Do I need to tell you that I was at one of the bleakest points of my life?

Nevertheless, I sat in my chair against that wall and made notes in my manuscript, sketching out a strange town I both belonged to and didn’t. Since my early thirties, I’d been trying to write my way back into a region from which I was alienated: Acadiana. I had left, not far, but I felt the pull back to places just beyond my old sawmill hometown, places where French was still spoken and the culture was lived, not merely memorialized.

There was no going back, however. So I fictionalized my own Acadiana as Berceuse, which means “lullaby” or in Cajun French “rocking chair.” But I couldn’t yet make the parish come alive. At best, I jammed disparate poems and pieces together.

The book needed more than my own voice. It needed an impresario.

By summer, sitting alone in my new bedroom, complete with rodents in the walls and a window view of an enormous oak toppling the backyard fence, I met my narrator, Gus Babineaux—a voice that became a character who wrote prose in a way that I would be too embarrassed to try, an extravagant voice alien to shame and self-doubt.

Before Gus, I had a smattering of poems, elegies, and epistolary pieces obsessively written and rewritten for years. Gus knew what to do with everything. He was loud, brash, opinionated, prolific, delighting in rumor and tall tales. He was the crescendo. With this new voice came other characters: a failed faith healer turning his yard into a garden of glass seraphim and a mother renaming trees in secret. I spent so much of my time in Berceuse Parish. Aside from my kids and one or two visitors at the apartment, I had no one. Even my family stayed away. So these characters became substantial.

Gus gave me a community, a book I could live in.

In that spare apartment with one or two rugs and so much cracked tile, I played with my kids and covered the walls in hand-drawn art and read them to sleep and stayed up late to listen to the wild tales of Gus Babineaux, an historian of this imagined town of Berceuse. His voice waxed poetic about Louisiana and its beauty while also critiquing the cliches rendered as the only acceptable terms to discuss a place that exceeds description. I have always felt out of place in Louisiana and have also never lived outside this state. It’s not that Gus helped me achieve a truce. He taught me how to inhabit the contradictions. What was turbulent and confused in me came out as absurd and ornate in him. He wrote with a confidence I could hardly pantomime.

But I didn’t give up. Gus created a host of weirdos, rejects, and more in the book. I’d find my own in real life, too.

But I had to learn to try. My whole writing life had been solitary. I shared my poems with few people, mostly editors of faraway magazines. Maybe two or three of my friends knew that I wrote and published. Envious of Gus’s aplomb, I risked finding a community. This was a new life. Why was I still hiding?

I would experiment and become an extrovert. At a coffee shop, I had noticed a physician often reading and studying. One fine day, she and I started chatting, the banter and chemistry so easy and immediate that I thought my experiment was an unprecedented success. That person would go on, some time later, to become my partner.

But I have to say this connection was an anomaly. Unlike Gus, I wasn’t terribly impressive in the conversational arts. Take, for example, the first poetry reading I attended. One of the organizers, an established poet I admired, sorta knew who I was and invited me to hang out with everyone. “Come to the afterparty. We have a pool.” I stumbled through a few incoherent lines, landing on this maxim: “Yeah, poets love pools.”

But I didn’t give up. Gus created a host of weirdos, rejects, and more in the book. I’d find my own in real life, too. After another reading, there was an open mic. Pathologically afraid of reading aloud at that point, I listened, amazed by one poet in particular, someone so funny and sharp: Justin Lacour. I had to introduce myself and did so in the most inadvisable way possible.

My confidence had cracked after the awkward debacle of the first reading, so I figured I couldn’t just go up to Justin. Instead, I waited outside, defeated. I looked up at the second floor window where all the other poets and attendees gabbed effortlessly. Why couldn’t I do that? What’s wrong with me?

At that point, Justin walked outside and headed to his car. He got pretty far from me when I finally overcame my self doubt and ran—I actually ran—toward him, catching up, breathless, all just to tell him I thought he was great. Taken aback, he thanked me and asked if I was a writer, too.

There it was. The moment of truth. Everything I doubted in myself before would be routed. I’m a poet, I would say. Ridiculous but true words, right? But I told him no. I didn’t even tell him my name.

Nevertheless, eventually, Justin became my friend. In the poetry world, my first one.

Around 2023, Gus and I were ready to send the manuscript off—or so I thought. Even Gus seemed restless in those “final” edits, his long sentences caterwauling rather than singing.

The apartment also rushed us out. The bathroom, its back wall streaked with water and soon mold, became a site of what I consider a miracle. My partner witnessed it too. The sink, no matter how frequently I cleaned it, would be repopulated with roach droppings the moment I stepped across the threshold. I’d clean the sink, step away, and voila—new roach pellets appeared. Incredible.

In the new apartment, the book changed—deepened.

But that’s not really what made me get out of that place. My landlord declined to pay a plumber, instead asking me to fix the problem for the impressive rent discount of $100. After a long afternoon of resealing the upstairs tub and then being texted “You’re a good man, Charlie Brown,” I found an available but pricey one bedroom in a former canning factory. I’d have even less money, but the space would be clean.

What’s really funny, though, is that the new place was a renovated factory restroom. I could see where the urinals used to be. But with the enormous windows and comforting millennial gray walls, my daughter and son and I were set. We would have a pool! A courtyard! Neighbors who would have loud sex around 3:00 am as I sat in my kids’ room and hoped they didn’t wake!

I was ready. Anything would be better.

Though I thought the book was done, to no one’s surprise reading this essay—it wasn’t. Expansive windows letting in abundant light can really make a difference in the creative life. The ceiling, in contrast to my first hovel, couldn’t be reached except by a tall ladder. Moving from a hovel to an airy, well-lit space made me want to revisit the book. I returned to Gus to fill out more of the text, to make it feel whole and lived in. Gus added footnotes to detail the town’s quirks and gossip and secret histories. He ceased to be a mere comic voice and got serious at times too, elegizing some of the characters whose lives he had charted.

In the new apartment, the book changed—deepened.

These revisions were commensurable to what was happening in my own life. My relationship with my kids had repaired and strengthened, and with a new partner, I fell deeply in love and learned how to cultivate a fulfilling relationship. In this new apartment, I framed the kid art and included other new pieces. I wanted this place to feel like home. It was wonderful, except for the time two feral dogs got loose on the second floor and maybe also except for the multiple times the industrial fire alarm boomed for hours in the night. It was great. No, comparatively, it was.

Oh, and I had a functional bedframe. So much had changed.

It had been two years since the end of my marriage. I won’t say I “figured out” how to live. But I liked living—I knew I would stick around. I didn’t, however, know how to close the book. Gus narrated my secret life, myths, and more. In the end, he had to tell his own story.

I really thought Gus would be my voice for the rest of my writing life. He and I would try short stories. Or a novel. Why not? We could do anything. We once lived among slugs.

But though Gus could still ramble and meander, the new writing didn’t become anything more than a concatenation of details. Less and less, could I hear Gus. I worried. What kind of writer would I be without him? This sounds precious, and maybe it is, but there’s been real grief for the loss of that voice, its insouciance and disregard of stylistic propriety. Gus was unafraid to be operatic, to be ridiculous.

Eventually, I moved from the cannery apartment. My partner, my kids—we’re altogether now. I thought Gus would come, too, but he hasn’t case. It’s almost as though, for the past two years, I had been living with a loquacious roommate. I miss Gus, even though in this latest place new voices have emerged.

I don’t have a tidy conclusion. If I did, I don’t think Gus would believe it anyhow. He preferred ambiguity. Without my narrator, I don’t think the book would have ever held together. And I am telling you that I have put my entire life and labor into that book, so I also believe that without Gus my new life would never have held together. I wouldn’t have been brave enough for it. In Berceuse Parish, there are so many elegies. I realize now, in a way, I am writing an elegy for Gus. He’d probably resist and call me sentimental, instead jotting some allusion to Hamlet or Turn of the Screw or riffing on the Old English etymology of ghost, that it comes from breath, and really, he would say, as soon as you start talking about any ghost, you are talking about a return.

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Berceuse Parish by Burnside Soleil is available from Texas A&M University Press.