J. Nicole Jones: Author of "Low Country" Discusses Memory, Female Anger, and Interrogating Our Family Stories
Low Country, J.Nicole Jones’ debut memoir, is one of the most exquisite pieces of non-fiction I have read to date. With lyrical prose that made me pause to contemplate their beauty and strength on every page, Jones tells of her girlhood in South Carolina. We learn of hurricanes and mermaids, tourist traps of Myrtle beach, and pirates. We hear ghost stories and folklore and follow her father as he embarks on a career as a country music star. Learn of cruel men and abuse, of extreme wealth and deep debt, all weaved into Jones’ childhood of wild landscapes and haunting legends. This is a story you don’t want to miss.
I had the pleasure of speaking with J. Nicole Jones over the phone where we chatted about the unreliability of memory, interrogating beliefs and events of one’s childhood, expressing anger as females, the unconventional structure of her memoir, and the process of writing her debut, Low Country.
Kailey Brennan: Was there a single event or an idea that prompted you to write Low Country? How did you know you wanted to write a full length book?
J. Nicole Jones: Yes and no, I would say. I started writing this 10 or 15 years ago. I also grew up thinking that the stories I was hearing were so strange and unusual compared with a lot of my friends' families, or what I knew from watching sitcoms, what was considered normal. So I was always jotting down or thinking in terms of storytelling. Which is such a big component to Southern families - probably everywhere I suppose - but I think there's a particularly bombastic way that often men will tell stories over and over and the way family stories get repeated.
So I started writing about my family a long time ago. I did an MFA at Columbia and wrote my thesis about my family and what was sort of a book, but, you know, not really. Then I kind of put it aside for a while and was working full time, like a lot of writers who have to juggle or who struggle with balancing. It was no different for me. I had a series of magazine jobs and as much as I really loved that, I was always thinking, I need to be writing this book. So I left a full-time job and was like, I'm going to write, I'm going to do it now. I wrote out a draft over a few months and then I had my work stolen from a car. I had my laptop and a bunch of notebooks stolen when our car was broken into.
KB: Oh wow.
JNJ: Yeah, I mean, I should not have left it. Don’t leave your laptop in the car and backup all your things. (Laughs) But I stopped writing after that and was like, well, you know, maybe one day I'll come back and turn this into a novel, or maybe the world is telling me that this is supposed to be something else, or maybe I'll turn some of the more fantastical seeming element even weirder and make them short stories or something. So I stopped writing. I felt like I had a good draft I was okay with, and then I lost that and I couldn't go back to it.
And about six or so months later, my grandmother died suddenly and I just had to get her voice down before I lost it, before I started forgetting things. So that prompted me to start scouring old emails and picking through my very old thesis for anything worth salvaging and just really trying to take an accounting of what materials do I have left after losing this amount? And what do I remember and what can I research and what do my other family members know dnd remember? So after she died, I needed to get her voice down on the page for myself, just to have her with me in some way. That became a draft of this book. I always knew that I had these funny stories I wanted to turn into writing or shape so losing her was really the key for me. It was motivation and the perspective to write with more of a purpose.
KB: What you said about losing your draft reminds me of something I heard or read from Lauren Groff. She writes a whole draft of a novel and then throws it away and starts again, which just blows my mind. But her whole philosophy is that the important parts, or the core of the story, are already there so she won’t forget them. So it's like her next attempt. That kind of happened to you without you even meaning to.
JNJ: Wow. I hadn't heard that from her, but I've heard similar things from other authors or read about people's processes. Just write something out and then throw it away or put it in a box. I think that those people are maybe a lot smarter in favor than I am (Laughs)
There were a bunch of photographs and quotes and things like that [that I could reference] but once somebody dies, those things are gone and then you can't call someone up and say, tell me that one story about the time that this weird thing happened, or one time you were telling me this story or you mentioned this person or this event. I guess that's just part of grief, you know.
KB: Definitely. I can imagine there is a level of vulnerability when opening up the world of one's family. Did you feel that way?
JNJ: Yes. I mean, I think there's a lot of consideration. I want to be honest on a page and forthcoming but also considerate of people who are in my life. So I read a lot of advice on the subject. There's a bunch of essays - I know David Sedaris has one- and Mary Karr has a book called The Art of Memoir and she devoted a chapter to figure out what's worth writing. My editor was very understanding and compassionate and said make sure that you're comfortable with relationships and things like that. My dad writes sort of publicly about our life. I think writing songs is a little bit different. Maybe writing a song is like writing a novel in some ways, or maybe it depends on the song, but there's that autofiction element to songwriting. So I was comfortable in terms of feeling that that was an okay way to make art or approach writing.
KB: There were many moments throughout the book that made me pause. Your use of language is exquisite. But I wanted to point out a particular passage. You speak about a sort of duality you felt as a child, of being both the responsible one but also being the bossy one who led the way on adventures but also is the one who was trusted to sit quietly and such. You said, “Responsibility was never, ever expected from the boys, most only a year or two younger. A different shade of anger, the silent resentment that smolders in all women, was beginning to rival the fear and hatred that I saw in Granddaddy. At least the anger of men counted.”
Can you speak about that last line in particular? That anger you began to notice but also knew it wouldn't be validated. I just found that so interesting.
JNJ: I think women's anger is not only dismissed, situationally and culturally, but also we learn to de-value it. It’s not as valued as men’s anger which is often justified and protected. So I think that when you start to see that in little instances and feel the expectation as a young girl, to kind of just get over things or swallow things that you see, or that seem unfair and how responsibilities are divvied up, or even in watching the marriages of your family members or people that you know, you start to observe inequalities and internalize them. Especially in thinking about my Nana and seeing her continually abused and her point of view and her physical presence devalued, it was just such a contrast to me. This person who I knew, and most of my family knew as this treasured woman who was so smart and so beautiful and compassionate. So to see her really derided and not treated well was a very early contrast to me. And I think when those things strike you, you start to see them in other little small behaviors that can grow into these cultural things that are acceptable in terms of how women are treated or how much we get paid.
Or, maybe a little bit of a stretch, but in the pandemic, the apportioning of childcare and who loses all their jobs first. I think all of those big cultural things are seeded in these little things that you get explicitly taught what's polite and what women need to do to be polite women, but also in what you observe and what you would just absorb by watching.
KB: When writing this memoir, did you feel like there were any specific questions you were trying to answer for yourself or something you were maybe hoping to find through writing about your family?
JNJ: I was really hoping to find that relationship with my grandmother and get that down on the page, very selfishly for myself. I guess this sort of relates to your last question too, but when you learn that women aren't as valued, you don't value yourself as much as a woman. I wanted to interrogate how I was doing that to myself and how I viewed these family stories growing up. And then how much was that influenced by growing up in a world where women are less valued and silenced often. So I think something that I tried to do with the structure was to invite the reader to re-imagine. To get the truth and what I witnessed down on the page and then to invite readers to reinvent that a little bit and say, let's imagine that things could be better.
KB: I love that. I’d love to switch gears a bit. From a craft perceptive, how did you know how to structure this book? Where it doesn’t necessarily move in chronological order I’d love to know your process for that?
JNJ: That took a really long time to figure out. I've been writing some version of this for a long time and I think in my head it's been so many things. When I lost my work, I thought, well, maybe I'll return to this somehow and make it a novel or I'll just pull out certain things and make them little weird short stories or something. I went into grad school thinking that I was going to write it maybe as a book of linked essays. Once I was really writing with that purpose of writing for my grandmother and writing to recover stories and voices and history, I wanted it to be kind of elliptical just because I think that's how a lot of family stories get told and how a lot of information gets revealed in stories. So I wanted that structure within the book to sort of mirror how that happens. Which is also I think how memory works too. You can remember things differently at different moments. My brothers, which I hopefully put in the book enough, will remember things a little bit differently than I do. And I think that it's important to interrogate that unreliability of memory and to be really clear about that and say, look, I remember it happening this way, but I know it must have happened this way. All of those things I wanted to recreate the experience of on the page. So keeping that elliptical structure was important to me and hard to get, I think. One of the more common responses I got when I started sending it out was maybe consider making it chronological. Which I think is a great suggestion, but it wasn't what I was trying to accomplish.
But when I was getting that [feedback] it was like well, I'm just not doing it right yet. There are things that need fixing if it's not coming across as the experience of remembering.
I love unusual structures and non-traditional forms. And since so much of the book is about my grandmother and re-imagining what it means to be a woman and inheriting these stories, I wanted the structure to be more feminine than just the kind of rise and fall of conflict. Also, the weather down there shaped the land so much. I wanted the structure to be shaped to mirror that and to be shaped almost like a hurricane. So like if my eyes going through the whole thing, like the last page kind of connects back to the first page - like it's a counterclockwise thing. So keeping track of that became a lot of post-it notes and a lot of highlighting different colors and really keeping track of the point of view of this particular sentence and where am I in time in this paragraph and how do you jump from there to there? So it took a lot of work.
KB: That’s interesting you received that feedback because as the reader, I really enjoyed that you had those little moments where you were kind of like, I know that I'm probably remembering this wrong or it could have happened this way. For me, it felt more intimate while reading it, because that is how you tell stories. You don’t tell them chronologically and you often backtrack. So I really liked that choice as the reader.
JNJ: Oh, thank you. I think that when I was getting that feedback, I just hadn't figured it out. I still had more work to do.
But I love that too, because so much about life is finding the truth and what you remember, but it's also those patterns that repeat and well, why am I remembering this like this? Or am I taking this part of my experience from this other thing that happens to me and really sorting through those layers of perspective and influence and really figuring out why it's so important and interesting. Memory is fundamentally unreliable. But investigating why we hold things a certain way even when they're probably not all the way right is interesting and more literary in some ways.
KB: Yeah. I'm curious if you are working on anything else right now., You've mentioned a few times that you were thinking about doing a novel or short stories. Is that something that you are working on now?
JNJ: I love writing about my family. I would love to continue doing that in some form. I grew up loving writing and literature and I feel so fortunate to have been able to study that a little bit in school. I just love all forms- I love memoir and essays and fiction and short stories. I think being able to, even think about approaching any of those is such a gift, but also kind of scary. So I suppose I'll see what happens.
KB: Since you freelance write and edit, I was curious about your writing routine. How you balance work and creative work.
JNJ: It’s a really hard balance. I’m so in awe of people who can get up before dawn or stay up really late and work that into family lives. I found it really difficult to do when I was working very demanding digital media jobs. I quit to write and I think since then I have had to learn to balance freelance attention with more creative writing. My routine sort of varies. Like I'll get into a routine for a few weeks or a couple of months, and then my work life will change a little bit or I'll be traveling. So my writing time will change. And I feel like if I'm just getting a couple of sentences down, sometimes that's enough. It’s really difficult to balance that. And I don't know that I have any great tips I'm afraid. (Laughs)
J. NICOLE JONES received her MFA in creative nonfiction from Columbia Uni- versity and has since held editorial posi- tions at VICE and VanityFair.com. Her essay defending the art of memoir, “Why’s Everyone So Down on the Memoir?,” was published by The Los Angeles Review of Books in 2013 and went viral, and her reviews and other writings have appeared in magazines, including Harper’s online. She grew up in South Carolina and now lives in Brooklyn and Tennessee.
