San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
1990s novel dug up and finished
Just three days before the COVID19 lockdown, novelist Nina LaCour was moving back to San Francisco. Her biggest project was to be setting up a home with her wife and child, complete with a new kitchen. With those plans suddenly on hold, LaCour found herself digging up an old novel she’d started nearly two decades ago as a student at San Francisco State University. During the pandemic, LaCour finally finished and sold “Yerba Buena,” a novel about women in love at a glamorous restaurant — all while she was kitchenless and cooking on a hot plate. “I know so many people who didn’t write at all during the pandemic, and people who were prolific. It depends on whether writing was your coping mechanism,” LaCour said.“For me, I was really escaping into the worlds I was able to cre ate. Through my writing, I was able to spend time in beautiful restaurants and travel and spend time with friends.”
“Yerba Buena,” due to be released by Flatiron Books next February, is LaCour’s first novel for adults after a career as a queer young adult writer. Her awardwinning YA novel “We Are Okay,” about a grieving queer San Francisco teenager who isolates herself in an empty college dorm, felt particularly prescient of quarantine loneliness. With “Yerba Buena,” LaCour continued exploring narratives of queer womanhood, but with the themes and scope of adulthood. Her newer work was inspired by her favorite quarantine reads, including Hanya Yanagihara’s saga “A Little Life,” which became a pandemic sensation.