A memoir of New Orleans' strength, not Katrina's

First came the storm. Then came the flood. And then came what was, perhaps, a bit more predictable: the surge of books about Hurricane Katrina and its nightmarish aftermath: Eyewitness accounts; photo documentaries, dense investigative texts attempting to explain why the levees broke, why people didn't (or couldn't) leave; and most poignantly, a stream of poetic elegies to a New Orleans culture that people feared would evaporate when the water finally retreated.

Journalist and essayist Julia Reed wasn't planning to write a Katrina book. In fact, her memoir, "The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story," isn't a Katrina book like Douglas Brinkley's "The Great Deluge" or others that are about the catastrophe itself, she says after ordering a glass of rosé in an Old Town Pasadena cafe before an evening reading at Vroman's. "I wanted it to be about New Orleans."

In fact, says Reed, she'd been thinking her next book, after 2004's book of essays, "Queen of the Turtle Derby," would be a "memoir/history of the Mississippi Delta where I'm from and got the last of its cultural heyday." About a week before the storm, she met with her agent to discuss it. "She told me: 'Go home and write a proposal.' And then here comes the hurricane and I'm thinking: 'Well, my current home is a lot more interesting than my former home all of a sudden.' "

This month marks Katrina's third anniversary, yet Reed's book is less about the lead-up and aftermath of the storm and its devastation and more about life: the varied nature of it, the value of it, and ultimately, the uncertainty of it. She was lucky: Hers wasn't one of the families which had had a roof torn off like a pull-tab, nor did she have to sit in the purgatory of the Superdome as all that water that rushed through, carrying away with it all manner of shrubbery, houses, bodies and dreams.

But all of that plays a part -- it has to. It's what happens when your life becomes entwined with a place as curious as New Orleans. "The House on First Street" is not just about Reed's slapstick-esque struggle with rehabbing her house pre-storm with men-for-hire -- "A sort of 'Year in Provence' meets 'The Poseidon Adventure' as one friend put it," she cracks, in her mentholated, party-girl drawl. It is about how the meaning of house, home and family redefined itself for her over time. Reed's book tackles what is often difficult to quantify: the stitching-together of a life that doesn't follow a traditional path; the gradations of privilege; a widening understanding of community. Writing the book "helped me make sense about how I got seduced by the city, and how I got seduced by my husband and, I guess, seduced by the idea of a house."