“Whiskey And Ribbons,” the debut novel from Leesa Cross-Smith, uses three separate narrators to tell their collective story.
The narrators include Eamon, a police officer, now deceased; Dalton, Eamon’s brother; and Evangiline, who was married to Eamon and recently gave birth to their child. Cross-Smith explains to City Lights host Lois Reitzes that when she set out to write the book, she wasn’t quite sure how to structure the book.
“I ended up structuring it as a fugue,” she says. “Which I came to find out, was to a composer, to write it as a piece of music, which means to take three voices and one of the voices drops out.”
Music did not simply inform Cross-Smith’s writing process, but rather plays a specific role in the lives of each narrator.
“Evangeline is a ballerina and so music would always, always be important to her,” the author says. “And then we have Dalton who’s a classically trained pianist, his mother was a concert pianist, and it just comes easy to him. He’s just good at it, it something he does, he doesn’t even do it professionally, he’s just good at it.”
