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I feel like I can write about Florida with irreverence, but have to write about New Orleans with reverence. Southerners don’t take kindly to that-you kinda have to have this almighty reverence for the place. Nola is a weird place like that-you don’t wanna exert ownership if you’ve only been here for eight years, like me. I would never attempt to tell you, “This is what New Orleans is like!” A lot of writers, especially post-Katrina, try to speak like an authority about it, but I would never feel comfortable doing that. I’m very comfortable writing about Florida, but I have a harder time with New Orleans. It’s a place of decay, and where a lot has gone very badly, but a place I love all the same. But Southern writing is nuanced-I mean, the Florida Karen Russell writes about is vastly different from my Florida, even though both have elements of a clearly bizarre place. The Southern canon seems to be ever-changing as the South itself evolves, so I know my writing doesn’t necessarily hark back to the days of Flannery. I feel like Southerners deal with different situations and circumstances than people in other parts of the world-we have such distinct issues with poverty and social issues that don’t get addressed because you’re dealing with crazy belief systems. I grew up poor in Florida-I have a very specific sort of family-and the characters in those stories are deeply embedded in my story, and in who I am. But I feel like if you are a writer who’s Southern, your sensibilities should probably just be organic. I do like that people read my writing as Southern and not just as that of a bland white person. How do you feel about this classification? Many seem to be proclaiming you as a true “Southern gothic” writer. But it quickly became evident that publishers weren’t particularly interested in essay collections, so I had to find some sort of an arc in there. Earlier versions of some of these essays had already been published on their own, and some other published essays about my life didn’t make it into the book. I did not originally set out to write a long-form piece. Did you write them as personal essays first, or did you plan on penning a memoir all along? There’s a definite flow to this book, but the chapters themselves stand on their own quite well. The very entertaining author recently spoke with me about place-based writing, the art of balancing the heavy and the funny, and how comedy tends to translate to the page.
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Knapp, a sixth-generation Floridian, now resides in New Orleans, where she serves as the editor of Eater NOLA, and as a freelance food writer.
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Throughout it all, Knapp’s honesty is a force as strong and compelling as her rollicking wit, bawdy jokes, and knack for assembling pages-long parades of the most zany and entertaining metaphors I can recall encountering. Readers come to know a dive bar palm reader who calls herself the Disco Queen Taiwan a slumlord with a penis-of-the-day listserv and Betty, the middle-aged cocktail convention volunteer who soils her pants on a party bus and is dealt with in the worst possible way. In After a While You Just Get Used to It (Penguin Random House, 2015), the hilarious meets the heartbreaking.
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Knapp’s sense of humor, however, is of the gallows variety-she doesn’t sugarcoat the pain of her oxycontin addict aunt’s eventual death, the struggles of growing up poor, the family fights that teeter between hilarity and violence, nor the anguish that comes with dating a serial cheater. The humor here is as wacky and multi-layered as the crap that takes over Knapp’s childhood home-think hair-care items ordered from infomercials, stacks of the Utne Reader and lightly damaged CD cases. Rather, it’s a fast-paced book about, to some extent at least, the junk that makes us who we are. Knapp, for instance, works at a cocktail convention and a cheese shop and has a food column, despite her lifelong battle with IBS, and her sister becomes a goth after getting a job at a fast-food joint. It doesn’t overshadow Knapp’s wonderful stories about family feuds, failed relationships, and inane jobs. But in Gwendolyn Knapp’s hilarious debut memoir, a collection of novelistic vignettes about growing up in a junk-filled house in redneck Florida within a family of “eccentric crackers,” and afterward carving out a life in New Orleans, only to have her mother Margie pack up her copious baggage and follow her daughter to the Big Easy, the hoarding is atmospheric-it never takes center stage. In recent years, much has been made of hoarders-in the wake of the eponymous hit A&E show, popular media has been fascinated with those suffering from pathological overconsumption.