Answer what is at once a basic but also exits into question about who belongs, whose stories get told. I wanted you speak into a void in the literature. I wondered why the stories of me and my family and my 50 nieces and nephews did not exist in the office told narrative of new orleans. I wanted to make a book that was the beginning of an answer to a question about how our lives mattered and how we deserved to also be on the american map, and then the citys story of itself. This book is that only a book about a house that i lived in and i loved and that in certain ways remain a part of me, but its really an attempt to think about what it actually means to belong to a place, what it means to feel that you have some a come from a place that has shaped you and made you into the person you are. For me, american ingenuity, i understand this i think deeply because i come from the city or jazz was born. And so what jazz teaches us is that we pull from all the disparate pieces of the world, the things inside of us and the things beyond us. And from that polling we can try to make something new and try to make a new tape history, and for me that was the work of this book, was to come in the way that he made his collage to actually pull from all the disparate elements to think that only about how, for instance, to use journalism, but how to use anthropology, how to use oral history, how to go in the archives and pull from history and use all of those pieces, the sounds of peoples voices, the rhythm of their voices. The city itself and the qualities of the place to try and make a work. Memory i think is one thing, but if they its also important to go beyond the things we remember, to inquire about other peoples memories, to fact check our memory because memory can lie actually. And so for me that really was the work. A few examples of the way in which i thought about memory and integrity memory in a way is and how i was thinking about my family history. All of us who are from families understand that over time we build family lore, and these stories are told over and over and over again. And throughout generations we often accept these stories from what they are. And so my work was not just to be in relation to my family as the youngest, in my case, of 12 children, but to interrogate the stories that had been told from birth, the stories about my own origins, the stories about why i was named what i was named, the stories that even i began to develop. Theres one particular story about my childhood friend, alvin, who died when we were quite young, under 20, and i had created for myself this story about his death, where exactly he died, what the circumstances of his death were. Because the truth was actually really hard. It was much harder than the story i made for myself, and in going back through the archives and the microfiche looking up the newspaper stories about his death, anything people about his death, i realize that the truth was a lot more brutal and i myself wanted to admit. To look back with courage and bravery and to think about context which informs our present time. What actually happened. Because that is indeed the bedrock for how we grow and you know, this story that i was telling, that rock was really an important thing because i thought so much about the ground itself at our house was sitting on. I thought about the stability of it, the structure of the foundation and the thing that i understood very quickly even perhaps as a child was that the foundation matters. Its everything. And history is that way too. We have to look on it. There is this wonderful quotation from john berger and he says to look as an active choice and i completely agree. Tellers are important because they create in us from a very young timesensitive structure for our lives. We can grow to feel so much a part of the house and i think so much about the way in which the house is an apt metaphor for so muchof our lives. The house being a metaphor for the self, being a way to also examine the house of the self and interiority. And i couldnt have asked for a better structure, really for this particular book because the houses of architecture and books and the house gave me away of framing, of creating a kind of tactile world, of thinking about the impact of a room and of an object and how those things can actually inform our interior world and make people of us. So how to this day remains so important for me, i thinking so much these days all of us who are in this together and what it means to be in our respective places and how much we can leave from those places. When you look out thewindow, what your view is. Its telling you something about your lot in life and thats something that is deeply important to me and its not lost on me and also, the ways in which a home whether you own a home or rent the home creates a kind of space where we can unfold ourselves and either be comfortable ornot comfortable. The feeling of belonging to a city like new orleans is i think something that we all understand on some level because its not that different in certain ways from what it means to also be american and to belong to this place. I think one of the things that interests me is what happens when a city is mythologized and also deeply beloved as new orleans is. What happens to the people who help make the stories of the place and what kinds of stories are told to the exclusions of others. So this complication of the story of a place many years later when i was outside of new orleans were the ways in which i allowed the city to stand out for me, to me, to in a way become me. That i could somehow explain myself by saying im from new orleans. So i really wanted to think about our connection to place and also honor, honor was very real for many of us about our connection to a certain spot of land. Our connection to a city. Understanding to that places have personalities and places make us. And ground us and they give us a certain Vantage Point. In my position and where im from, where we were situated , cut off in away from the rest of the street, cut off from the rest of the city, i believe that dave me a certain Vantage Point that no other positioningever could. On the matter of memory and also of reason and logic being so important, i think its complicated things because so much of memory is in fact tied to reason and logic which is why it becomes easy to believe the memory wholeheartedly. And what im interested in though is how we collect memory sometimes in order to sort of avoid another reality. Another hard place where we might go and part of my own training as a journalist tells me that memory is important. Its the beginning. Its the opening of the door. It gets us spacing in a certain direction but part of think the way in which i wanted to complicate my own work is not just to remember, not just to say i think this happens but i cant remember. To actually build back into the archives, to do reporting , to interrogate the memory. To tear the memory apart in away and say what is the thing that i was building in this memory or that someone else was building and what was the truth of the matter and i think memories contain a kind of essence, a kernel of truth. Something that is really important member isnt always wrong oreven off. But i do feel there is something to going beyond the thing you remember and stacking it with everything you can find, evidence and thinking about, this is interesting from my perspective because my grandmother who was really important to me in new orleans and all kinds of affecting things in her life and there was so much she didnt remember so when memory is in any way compromise, what more exists and where else can we go was the question i was asked . So i grew up in this colorful house where stories were revered and storytelling was a sort of sport so you have to imagine how with 12 or 13 people and theyre all telling variations of the same story, theyre talking loud, theyre talking over each other and in an effort to find a place in this world , the thing that i would do is go in the room where the stories were happening and i would hide in closets or under the table and often i simply tried to remember every single word that was being said and sometimes people were telling stories that they didnt want the other person to know so ill would essentially record these things in my mind and then run off and find the exact person about who the story was about and i would essentially tell them and in this way i had a tape recorder which is was a thing i didnt remember but its a great example of the way in which my family really told me the story of myself and really helped me in so many ways to understand who i was and my own compulsion. I think a lot about the day when i went to kindergarten for the first time. And before that moment, i had been called monique which is my middlename. And my mother came to me and we were in the parking lot of the school and she says when those people asked your name, tell them sarah and i thought sarah, who is sarah . And i essentially started going by this name in school and created this real duality in me. There was the sarah person who people called when i was sort of out in public and within that name which contained so much was so much distance and then there wasmy middle name , monique and mo which is what myfamily calls me. And i came as at some point to understand that there were these many cells and perhaps this was a useful story being a black woman in america. It was perhaps useful but to this day, the story of that naming, of how i was named and speaking about who in my life knows which name to call has been a kind of recurring theme so im thankful for that memory of my mother who helped me remember. I hope that readers learn from this for the dynamism of absence, that for me , i can never ever look upon any landscape the same way. When i drive by a place and its being demolished and Something Else is going up in its stead, i always think of the stories that we can tell, the stories of families that lived in thehouse, the memories, the joy. Our human connection. The place and the land and how that connection is such a vital final thing that i think matters deeply to all of us and so places matter and People Matter and we have to be i think careful about the known masks and they leave off and we have to remember even on the edges of the map that there are stories. There are people whoselives matter. I think writers exist for these moments where we have to take the detritus. In my case its the demolished house. We have to take whats left of something or even whats no longer there and wetry to make something of it. So for me, the pole or the question, the thing that was agitating me was how can i use words. How could i resurrect a house with words . And suddenly words dont really poultry, like inadequate tools and i think that going back, that revisiting. Faith baldwins has this wonderful line. I returned here because i was afraid to and i think for me, that was the cost, to effacing my fear and all the things i didnt want to know but that i ultimately knew had to bedealt with. [music] youre watching tv on cspan2. For a complete schedule visit booktv. Org. Follow along with the behindthescenes on twitter, instagram and facebook. Welcome to our Cato Institute conversation with pj over. Im executive Vice President of cato. It will be taking questions and you can submit them via the Cato Institute webpage, twitter or youtube and use the hashtag cato events. We have many distinguished scholars at the cato