Michelle Blanchard Ardillo

We Don’t Talk About That is a soon to be published work of nonfiction written by Amanda Schoepp. It is part memoir, part biography, part diary, part psychological study, and part true crime story. It is about a very dark moment in 1963 in the DesHotel family of Louisiana, and that darkness dripped down and stained the generations of DesHotels that followed. 

Amanda Schoepp is the great granddaughter of Clifton (Clif) and Lena Deshotel (later changed to DesHotel). When Amanda was a 13-year-old she traveled by train with her grandfather, Jimmy Deshotel, from Los Angeles to New Orleans. On that long train trip, Amanda’s grandfather finally told her the one thing that “We Don’t Talk About That” in full, gory detail. His father Clif shot Jimmy’s mother Lena in the head with a shotgun and then attempted to take his own life with the same shotgun. He only grazed his temple, however, and had to walk to a relative’s house nearby to retrieve his revolver so he could finish the job. In what was always described as a “terrible accident,” four children lost their parents and thus began a multi-generational world of dysfunctional family life and trauma. 

After giving the backstory of how the Cajun ancestors of Clif and Lena came to settle in New Orleans, Amanda details each of the four siblings from the point of the tragedy forward to present day. Each job, marriage, childbirth, home purchase, relocation, divorce, and more is dissected. 

In putting this story in black and white print for her own mental health and for the generations that will follow her, Amanda takes back some of the control she rarely had as a child. She interviews as many relatives as she can, documents their feelings about the long-held family secret, and also documents the damage keeping something like that hidden has done to all of them. 

I connected with Amanda via LinkedIn, based purely upon my upbringing in a small town near New Orleans, with a Cajun father, who in many ways shared some of the traits and characteristics of the male relatives in Amanda’s family. My own paternal grandmother could only read in French. She spoke Cajun French to her children until they went to school, where they were forbidden to speak their native tongue. My father often would resurrect the Cajun dialect when talking to his older sister when he didn’t want the children to understand him. 

In reading Amanda’s book, I found many things that brought me right back to Port Sulphur, Louisiana. Gumbo and crawfish boils. The adults playing Bourré, a card game where bets are made on the tricks you can win with your hand of cards. Fig trees. Cicadas singing while the adults sat outside on the front porch. Never-ending cups of coffee. The Young and the Restless being watched every single day, and the young ones knew better than to act up during that time. Saints football games. I, too, had a relative named Alida (pronounced Ahlee-DAH). And, sadly, Katrina. 

One particularly poignant story was when Amanda’s great grandmother, prior to her untimely death, made a vow to God that if her young granddaughter Connie could recover from a head wound, Lena would never play cards again. In my own family, my dad’s much older half-sister Lillian made a similar vow that if her only son could return safely from Vietnam she would only wear blue, black, and white for the rest of her life. And so she did. 

This book is a hard read. Nearly all the members of this family struggled with finances, work, homes, marriages, child-rearing. Only Adrian and his wife, Marilyn, somehow seemed to figure it out and raise their children in a way that diverted them from the ongoing trauma. Adrian, the family self-proclaimed genealogist, wrote the foreword to the book, and helped Amanda procure much of the family history told within. 

The book is hard to read in other ways. It meanders a bit and with so many names – both main characters and some very minor ones – it is sometimes confusing. The ARC digital copy I was given to read on my black and white kindle did not label the photos at the beginning as a family tree so I was lost a few times trying to connect new people to the original four siblings. This should be better in a print copy. 

One other thing is that there are a lot of details to digest, some big and important, and some not so. Perhaps some of the lesser important details could have been left on the cutting room floor. 

One final thought. As an aspiring novelist myself, I know how long the road is from research to plotting to drafting to editing, all the time hoping and praying someone will like it enough to say they will publish it. So, all readers should take that into consideration before they declare something a “bad read” or “a waste of time,” because there is a reader for every book and a book for every reader. This book, Amanda’s family story, will be sitting on shelves soon and that is a major victory in the book world, a major victory for her. 

Thank you to NetGalley, Köehler Books, and Amanda Schoepp for the ARC ebook. Best wishes on publication day!