The tree-lined Woodland Ridge street where 39-year-old author M.O. Walsh grew up has changed a bit in the intervening decades, but the view from his childhood home on the corner is the same. It’s an encompassing view that takes in both intersecting streets and a dozen houses on either side—a cinematic wide-angle shot.
M.O. Walsh’s book was released in February 2015 and has since become a New York Times best seller.
From here, it’s easy to imagine how the whole world might have sometimes felt narrowed down to this residential corner in Walsh’s childhood. How he remembers small strips of lawn as sprawling football fields. How a half-heard suburban secret left such a mark that it would one day drive Walsh’s best-selling debut novel, My Sunshine Away.
He’s returned to visit a local book club, the Happy Hour Book Club, whose meeting this month is centered on My Sunshine Away. It’s his first time back in the neighborhood—not just since his book hit the New York Times Best Sellers List, but since moving away years ago and becoming the director of the University of New Orleans’s Creative Writing Workshop. The distance has helped preserve the setting in his memory and provided the perspective for a new story of his own invention.
A dozen women, most of them with careers in publishing and many with the LSU Press, sit inside one member’s home on Woodland Ridge Boulevard and listen to Walsh unpack the contents of his book from the neighborhood that mapped it.
“I always caught myself telling people about how great my childhood was in this neighborhood and how much fun we had playing in the creek and that kind of stuff. But I also always remembered the story about a girl in our neighborhood being attacked when she was really young,” Walsh tells the club. “The older I got, the more I had to stop ignoring that memory … it just seemed so strange that [my childhood] could be so great for me but so horrible for someone right across the street.”
The fictional story of My Sunshine Away takes place in the late 1980s in suburban Baton Rouge and follows a 14-year-old narrator as he hunts for the truth about who raped his neighborhood crush, a crime for which he happens to be a suspect. Though it is told in first person and structured around the boundaries of Woodland Ridge and Episcopal
High School, Walsh clarifies that the book is in no way autobiographical.
“It just seemed so strange that [my childhood] could be so great for me but so horrible for someone right across the street.”
“As a writer, it helps to know your borders,” Walsh says. “You have to help yourself out. That’s why [in the book] there are four suspects, not 10. I used the neighborhood as a map for the story I wanted to tell, but there was no creepy guy down the street. The broken street lamp where Lindy was attacked isn’t really here.”
The layers are complex; My Sunshine Away is a bit of a paradox. Despite its dark subject matter, it comes off as a hopeful search for good amidst a loss of innocence. Though the novel explores a victim’s life and the circumstances of the crime that changed her, Walsh’s narrator eventually understands that Lindy’s story isn’t his to tell.
And while it’s a deeply personal and deeply local story, events like the Challenger explosion and the Jeffrey Dahmer case place the story in context and remind the reader that suburban adolescence is similar for pretty much everyone, whether they live in Louisiana or elsewhere.
“I love Faulkner, but I think it’s time that Southern novels started admitting to the fact that we have televisions. We’re affected by things outside of our own tiny little sphere,” Walsh says.
This, it seems, was Walsh’s ultimate goal in writing the novel: to show that Baton Rouge has stories worth telling, and that those stories aren’t just unrelatable cliches of swamp people and rural mystics. One chapter uses the contrast between Baton Rouge and New Orleans to illustrate the difference between the under-heard narrator and his unattainable crush, at once speaking to Baton Rouge natives about life in the shadow of New Orleans and coloring that relationship for the unfamiliar.
To readers, the book is both a code and a key for translation. One member of the book club, a transplant to Baton Rouge from New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina, tears up as she explains what the chapter about the relationship between the cities means to her personally. But Walsh also recounts the story of a reader from Connecticut who told him this Baton Rouge tale felt exactly like her own childhood.
Coming of age in the suburbs, he explains, isn’t exclusive to sleepy New England towns, and Baton Rouge’s unique colors don’t exclude it from being a relatable backdrop.
“I’ve had people approach me crying and tell me, ‘You finally told our story,’” Walsh says. “And that’s the whole point of the book, in a way—that every story is valid.”
