The Sweetest Fruits

Author Q&A

Q&A with Monique Truong

The Sweetest Fruits follows the life of nineteenth-century writer Lafcadio Hearn. How did you decide to tell his story?

In 2009, sugar and cornbread led me to Lafcadio Hearn. My second novel, Bitter in the Mouth, set in a small town in North Carolina where I grew up, was coming out the following year, and it would include this passage:

My great-grandfather Graven Hammerick, upon his return from New Haven, was said to have refused the cornbreads served to him by his mother because they weren’t sweet enough for his northern-influenced palate. Because she couldn’t stand the sight of him not eating, his mother always had a batch made just for him with heaping spoonfuls of sugar added to the batter, but she also made it a point to wrap . . . [them in] a black cloth before bringing them to the table. She wanted to remind her son that something inside of him had died.

As the author of a previous food-centric novel, as well as articles for Gourmet, Food &Wine, and The New York Times’s Dining section, I knew that a surprising number of my readers would have deep historical knowledge of regional cornbread recipes, and they would agitate and foment if my assertion, vis-à-vis the sugar distinction, were made in error. I needed to have a published citation from a trusted source. I needed cornbread corroboration.

In my small but overstocked kitchen in Brooklyn, I had culinary reference books of all kinds, and among them was The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Volume 7: Foodways. As I flipped through its pages, I spied an unusual, geographically difficult-to-pinpoint name: “Hearn, Lafcadio (1850–1904),” identified as a “journalist, author, and illustrator.”

The entry began with his birth on the island of Santa Maura (now Lefkada, Greece); described a lonely childhood in Dublin, Ireland; then an emigration to Cincinnati; and a subsequent migration to New Orleans, where it revealed his contribution to the history of Southern food:

Opened the short-lived 5-Cent Restaurant and collected recipes of local dishes. Hearn published these recipes in 1885 as La Cuisine Créole, which became the earliest published collection of New Orleans and Louisiana recipes . . . [, which] continues to serve as an invaluable record of the history of Creole food, New Orleans, and Louisiana.

The entry then shared Hearn’s entirely unexpected second act:

Hearn moved to Japan, taught English, changed his name to Koizumi Yakumo, married a Japanese woman who was the daughter of a samurai . . . and continued his voluminous writing. . . . Hearn secured a place in history after publishing numerous volumes . . . particularly Japanese fairy tales.

I reread the apocryphal-seeming nub of a biography. Little of it made sense to me, the sentences harboring a random collection of facts and locales. I sensed that all the good bits—the crackling in the cornbread, if you will—were missing, and set out to discover more.
 
This is in large part a novel about the recovery of lost and forgotten voices—specifically the voices of women. Readers meet Hearn through the eyes of the women in his life and, through their stories, also discover a trio of tenacious, brave, and inspiring women largely left out of the historical record. Who are Rosa, Alethea, and Setsu? What can we learn from them?

The Sweetest Fruits is told from the perspective of the three women who knew Hearn best: Rosa Cassimati, Alethea Foley, and Koizumi Setsu. They are joined by a fourth, Elizabeth Bisland, Hearn’s first biographer, whose excerpted book serves as the historical framework and a counter narrative to the novel’s own. Refusing to be overlooked, dismissed, and forgotten, the trio steps forward, each with a singular purpose in mind:

Rosa, on a ship in the Irish Sea in 1854, is leaving Hearn, her four-year-old son, behind in Dublin. Heavy with guilt but guided by fate and faith, the two forces that have shaped her life, she wants him to know why she is no longer with him and dictates a letter in the hopes that he will one day read it.

Alethea, in Cincinnati in 1906, has just learned of Hearn’s passing, two years after the fact. Her husband, whom she met when she was a cook at his boardinghouse and he an aspiring journalist, left her nothing in his estate and a soon-to-be-published biography is intent on erasing her from his life. Speaking to a reporter, Alethea asserts her claims both to his property and his life story. Born an enslaved person in Kentucky, she reveals what attractions had brought them together and what youthful hubris had torn them apart.

Setsu, in Tokyo in 1906, stands before Hearn’s photograph at the family altar. Upon his passing, he was a celebrated author, her husband, and the father of their four children. Tasked with writing a memoir of her life with this writer who considered himself more Japanese than the Japanese, she has unleashed what would never be published, the truth of how they embarked upon their union as husband and wife and as literary collaborators. The pages that Setsu shares with him, departed in body but still present in spirit, are the unredacted, unvarnished, and untold story of how Lafcadio Hearn became Koizumi Yakumo.

During the lifetimes of the women in The Sweetest Fruits, writing and publishing were the provinces of men, with rare exceptions such as Elizabeth Bisland and Koizumi Setsu. Oral storytelling, on the other hand, belongs to us all. Too often it was the only thing that belonged to women who, like Rosa and Alethea, were denied the written word by patriarchy and by slavery, respectively. Their efforts to bring their stories to the page, despite the limitations and the odds, are emblematic of their will and determination to create lives unbounded by their eras, gender, or race.

Even when access to the written word is within their grasp, the stories proffered by women, like Setsu and Elizabeth, are often in service of others and not themselves. The aims of their books, Reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn (1918) and The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn (1906), respectively, were to document, burnish, and protect the legacy of the “great man” around which they were seen to orbit like pale moons. The Sweetest Fruits imagines their voices, prior to the interventions, the compromises, and the eradication of their truths, which in the end are the eponymous fruits.
 
You say that you began your research on Hearn by reading his cookbook, La Cuisine Créole. What did you learn from his early writing?

On the pages of La Cuisine Créole, I got to know a Lafcadio Hearn who was an exceptional man for his time, one who reveled in the heady, exuberant mixture of peoples and flavors that greeted him in New Orleans. I also met a Lafcadio Hearn who was a man of his time, limited by nineteenth-century biases and blinders, a man who in 1885—two decades after the Civil War—did not include one word about slavery nor the labor of enslaved people who had made it possible for a household recipe to begin with a directive such as “take 100 oysters.” I found a man who had no qualms profiting from the work products and creativity of others with little or no attribution; a man who appreciated the company of women, in particular the single ones or the servant ones—in other words, a man who was a complicated piece of work whom I wanted to grab by his starched white collar and shake some sense into.

Some cookbooks made me want to cook. Lafcadio Hearn’s made me want to get into a fight. Do you know how novelists fight? We write a novel about you.
 
Hearn, in a sense, did the reverse migration that you yourself did, coming from Vietnam to America. Can you speak to how themes of immigration and migration are featured in the book?

When my family came to the United States as refugees from the Vietnam War in 1975, I was six years old, and the decision to leave all that we knew behind—our extended family, our first language, all of the physical and emotional assemblage of home—wasn’t mine to make. It was a journey that changed our lives and, as my father would have told you, a journey that allowed us to continue living. For him, it was a clear-cut, life-or-death decision. I’ve asked myself many times if I would have made the same choice. Would I have been so clearheaded, mentally tough, optimistic, and brave? To me, these are the necessary traits that all immigrants must possess in order to leave, and then to survive.

In writing The Sweetest Fruits, I wanted to know what had propelled Hearn, and whether he, after circumnavigating the globe, had found what he was looking for. My gut told me that Hearn was hungry: for love, family, a sense of belonging, a daily meal that fed body and soul. A cookbook author, same as a food writer, was always hungry; an immigrant one was even more so, I knew. We, who make it our business to know the minutiae of the kitchen and the table, often carry within us an obsession: the keen desire not for the next filling meal but for the next fulfilling meal. The difference, we know, is not dependent upon the recipes but upon the cooks. We, who have immigrated to other shores, find that the pivotal ingredients—caring, empathy, affinity, communion, and love—can be scarce and difficult to source in our new home. We often find ourselves ravenous in a land of plenty.