A California journey
Nina LaCour shows her home state some love as she traces two young friends from Long Beach to the Bay Area
Author Nina LaCour began work on her first novel when she was still in college. In a flash of inspiration, she envisioned Sara, a character whose tragic past would only slowly reveal itself to the writer.
“I knew that she had a brother that she had abandoned, but I didn't know why yet,” LaCour says from her San Francisco office. “I kept thinking about this character and writing scenes and trying to figure her out.”
But the story of Sara, as well as that of Emilie, the two young women at the center of LaCour's latest novel, “Yerba Buena,” would have to wait. In the meantime, she would write “Hold Still,” her award-winning debut, and a succession of young adult books.
LaCour never abandoned the tale — she would pull out her folder and go through the pages she had written between projects — but it wasn't until the COVID-19 pandemic and its subsequent stay-at-home order that she turned her energy toward finishing what she had begun years earlier.
“After selling my first novel, I've had contracts for other books, so I've had this really wonderful and rare job security that I felt very fortunate to have as a writer,” LaCour explains. “To write a whole novel and have no idea if it would end up selling — or even going anywhere — felt like a huge risk, but it was something that felt very important to me.”
“Yerba Buena” (Flatiron Books, $26.99) spans California as it follows the lives of Sara and Emilie; the book trails them from their teen years to their chance meeting as adults working at the same posh Los Angeles restaurant and into their early courtship. Throughout the book, LaCour takes readers from the small town along the Russian River where Sara was raised to the vintage Long Beach home of Emilie's grandmother, with lots of stops across Southern California in between.
In the process, LaCour says, writing “Yerba Buena” became a way to explore the state at a time when the pandemic took even local travel off itineraries.
“It became this wonderful escape for me as the days stretched on and there was so much uncertainty,” she says. “Every day, I would return to the story and work on it and imagine myself in beautiful homes and restaurants and being served delicious plates of gorgeous food.”
Raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, LaCour has been traveling to the Russian River since childhood. Her mother would take her on walks through Armstrong Redwoods State Natural Reserve. When they visited, they would stay at a motel that inspired the fictional one where teenage Sara works. “I have very fond memories of staying there,” says LaCour.
LaCour aimed to explore her love for this part of Northern California while delving into a story that involved drug use, poverty and abuse.
“It's an area that has a lot of those issues, that has been really plagued by drugs and poverty, as many small, vacation destination towns are. When you visit, it only takes a little bit of observation to see that not everyone there is living as fortunately as the Bay Area tourists are,” says LaCour. “I wanted to honor the place while telling Sara's story and representing the complexities of the area.”
For Emilie's story, LaCour drew from elements of her family's history in Los Angeles, where her dad was raised and where she visited often enough to refer to it as a “home away from home.” Also, she had long wanted to explore her Creole heritage. “I didn't really know how to do it, and then it snuck its way into this book in a way that was really gratifying and therapeutic to write,” she says.
In particular, LaCour gives a nod to her late grandparents — her grandfather died a decade ago, while her grandmother passed while she was writing “Yerba Buena” — through various details in the book. “I borrowed very heavily on their story,” LaCour acknowledges. “In fact, I lifted actual lines from their love letters, and all the houses that Emilie's grandparents lived in in the book, mine also lived in.”
As teenagers, Sara and Emilie are impacted by substance abuse within their families. “As I was writing, so much of my writing process is a process of discovery, so very little is planned out for me before I start to write,” says LaCour. “Often, I'm kind of perplexed by what I end up putting on the page and then, later, I step back and think about my own life and where these things came from.”
She adds, “My experience with drug addiction is one of being a bystander and a witness to how damaging the impact can be on other people, and that's a very scary and lonely place to be when you watch these substances take over the life of someone who you know.”
With “Yerba Buena,” the author was able to follow her characters into their 20s and see how their teenage experiences continued to affect their lives. Their meeting coincides with a point in life where both have attained some stability but still have a lot of room to grow.
“This being my first adult novel, I was really able to stick with my characters as they grew older, which is a luxury that I didn't have in my young adult work, where I was limited to the teen years,” says LaCour.