Heart Like Water: Documenting the post-Katrina French Quarter

This summer New Orleans writer and publisher Joshua Clark released a Hurricane Katrina memoir entitled Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone. Josh is an old friend from my days of living in the French Quarter in early 2005, so I won’t presume to objectively review the book here — especially since I know many of the people mentioned in its pages. Still, I highly recommend Heart Like Water as an unusual sort of travel memoir, wherein Josh and his French Quarter friends journey into their newly unfamiliar city in the days and weeks after it was transformed by Katrina.

Though Josh touches on government incompetence and the tragedies of the greater Gulf region after the hurricane, he is at his best when he captures the absurd hilarity of trying to survive in the French Quarter in Katrina’s wake. Anyone who’s lived in the French Quarter will know that the bars there are de facto community/communication centers, and Josh brings the Quarter alive with his portrayals of the characters who gather in places like Molly’s and Johnny White’s to drink and cope and figure out what to do next.

Over time, these bars come to be dominated by the media outlets that descended on New Orleans after Katrina — and Josh teases out the arrogance and cluelessness of these expense-account-funded reporters: The weather reporters melodramatically pretending to lean into the wind when Rita approaches; the ESPN crew dropping a Saints-game live-feed from a New Orleans bar and going to suburban Metairie because they wanted a “big bouncy bubbly crowd”; the unconfirmed rumors being reported as news, day after day.

In the months since Katrina, the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans has come to symbolize everything that went bad two years ago (and tourists have turned it into a site of fascination and pilgrimage — as I noted last year). Heart Like Water occasionally visits and examines this part of the city (as well as storm-damaged parts of Mississippi and rural Louisiana) — but this story is essentially about the French Quarter: a neighborhood that is wealthier and drier than the poorer parts of the city, but still suffering under a surreal transformation as the city tries to cope with an unprecedented disaster.

More info about Heart Like Water can be found here; more info on post-Katrina New Orleans can be found here.