Julie Liddell Whitehead Images

Hurricane Baby Q&A with Julie Liddell Whitehead

Q: What is the main point or purpose of the book?

A: I always write to answer a question I have. In the case of Hurricane Baby, I wondered: What would happen to someone who endured Hurricane Katrina without suffering physical losses but was destroyed psychologically? That’s where the crux of the book lies for me.

Q: What was the most surprising or shocking thing you learned from writing the book? How did it make you feel?

A: How much darkness spilled out of me. So much destruction and death and sin just came pouring out. And happy endings were very elusive. I couldn’t think of any way for events to end happily ever after. All the moral choices that presented themselves seemed to lead to the character having to decide between the frying pan and the fire.

Q: How did your choices of how to frame and organize the book impact your writing?

A: I framed it first as a novel with Wendy and Judd’s indiscretion being the action that gets events moving, and all the subsequent action revolved around that. In 2022, when I picked it back up again, I decided to keep the most emotionally impactful scenes and rewrite them as short stories. About half of the original novel remains—some scenes were rewritten to apply to other characters than were in the original, while I wrote several brand-new sections to explore all these new characters.

Q: What are some of the ethical, moral, or social implications of the book? How did it challenge you as a writer?

A: One important theme of the book is the fragility of conventional morality when faced with traumatic situations. In this book, the trauma causes all the characters to do things they would never dream of doing under normal circumstances. Wendy can’t articulate why she gave in to Judd. Tommy had never taken a drink in his life until after he learned that Amy Thompson didn’t make it. Dinah is helpless in the face of what’s happening to Mike. James and Lori’s relationship was doomed because of the trauma each had to face alone.

Q: Which character did you relate to or empathize with the most as a writer and why?

A: Actually, I think Dinah Seabrook is the most appealing character in the book. I know I felt very protective of her as I was writing about her. She stayed strong in circumstances that certainly would have sent me around the bend had I been her. She’s watching her world and life and marriage and husband fall apart, and all she has to hold on to is her faith. Writing her made for some bright spots in the book.

Q: Which character did you dislike the most and why?

A: Jack Rawson, for sure. His dismissive attitude towards Wendy in the labor room and her dislike of him points to some history between them we don’t get to see. And his acting so possessive of her after Ray dies and Judd comes back to Hattiesburg comes off as him thinking he’s in charge of her now? Ugh.

Q: What was the most memorable or shocking scene or twist in the story when you were writing it?

A: Actually it came pretty early. I had only planned to write a short story about Wendy and Judd’s encounter during the hurricane. After I finished it, I thought I was done. But a few days after I thought I finished it, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be a kick in the pants for Judd to find out she was pregnant and wonder for the rest of his life if it was his baby?” And that question led to more questions, and pretty soon, I had a book.

Q: How did writing this book impact you? It has so many dark elements; how did you handle writing some of the more difficult sections?

A: In some ways, it was very exciting; I felt I was stretching myself as a writer and telling an important story that showed how the storm affected people not on the coast or in New Orleans. The challenge came this last time through to match what I was writing now with what I had written then. This time, I was choosing to put the characters in impossible situations and choosing to keep twisting the knife and raising the stakes. I used to be a very binary thinker—right was right and wrong was wrong. Writing Hurricane Baby taught me nuance—that sometimes all the choices people face are bad choices.