Riverside’s Susan Straight talks about her pandemic novel, ‘Sacrament’ – Press Enterprise

Susan Straight was telling us about her new novel, “Sacrament,” which like her others is set largely in the Inland Empire. This one is perhaps her most contemporary yet, rooted not only in place but in time.

The action occurs during summer 2020 and follows nurses who are treating patients during the coronavirus pandemic.

“It was a very scary thing to write about,” Straight said during a talk Wednesday evening. “I was watching people pass away from COVID all around me.”

The Riverside writer was speaking at the Culver Center for the Arts, where she was interviewed onstage by politico Jose Medina and fellow writer Alex Espinoza. Jorge Hernandez, a KUCR disc jockey (and Superior Court judge), played R&B oldies named in the book.

More than 75 of us were there on folding chairs, listening.

Straight has penned 10 novels, with her most recent, 2022’s “Mecca,” a national bestseller that was named one of the year’s best by the Washington Post and NPR.

“Sacrament” had its genesis in the nurses who passed Straight’s Brockton Avenue house on foot heading to or from Riverside Community Hospital. Three of them live on her street. Traveling nurses from out of state rented rooms or stayed in rented RVs on the next block.

They got into conversations with the gregarious writer as she tended to her “fence library” of donated books.

“They would tell me things,” Straight related. About how they turned men over to lie on their stomachs to aid their breathing. “No matter how big they were, their backs were so tender,” Straight said. “Their feet were so vulnerable. Isn’t that great? I had to write it.”

During her first week of writing, Straight was in her kitchen when she heard horses.

She looked out to see four white horses and a white carriage, pulling a blue casket, followed by a cortege of lowriders with their tops down. They were heading south on Brockton to Evergreen Cemetery, Riverside’s oldest and largest resting place.

The scene sounds like something out of “Stagger Lee” or “St. James Infirmary”: horses hitched to a rubber-tired hack, seven people going to the graveyard and only six coming back.

The drivers were playing the doo wop classic “Nite Owl,” openly crying.

“I stayed up all night, writing,” Straight said. “A lowrider funeral, that was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen.”

The story is about critical care nurses working at a San Bernardino hospital, which Straight named simply Our Lady. “You know it’s St. Bernardine’s,” she confided from the stage, “but don’t say anything.” The secret is safe with us.

The pandemic’s isolation is a theme.

In “Sacrament,” families are unable to visit loved ones due to the risk of spreading infection. A nurse sings to comatose patients to reassure them they aren’t alone. Another nurse takes care of her colleagues as well as her patients.

And the nurses’ teenaged children, kept separate from their mothers for safety, have to navigate online learning.

“I’m on page 92 of her book,” Medina said in introducing Straight on Wednesday, “and when I get home, I’m going to continue reading it.”

I bought a copy that night.

Flipping through it later, I spotted references to Rialto, the Coachella Valley, Chino Hills, the 91 Freeway, Arrowhead Avenue, San Gorgonio High, Hesperia, the Salton Sea and Calimesa. Also, to TikTok, OnlyFans, Instagram, hashtags, DoorDash and conversations by text.

Espinoza, like Straight a UC Riverside writing professor, asked her about the challenges of writing about recent times.

One day, COVID-19 will be like the Dust Bowl or the Great Depression, Straight said, when we have more distance from it. But why wait?

“I don’t want people to forget this happened in our community,” Straight said. “At one point Riverside County was third in the nation in infections.”

She attributed that to the Inland Empire’s high percentage of warehouse and essential workers, people who found themselves on the front lines whether they wanted to be there or not.

A neighbor across the street died in his house and was wheeled away as his wife and Straight watched. Her neighbor next door was swaying on the sidewalk when the ambulance came. He was stricken early, “before we knew what COVID was,” Straight said.

Her mother entered assisted living the week before the COVID stay-at-home order. Straight taught classes via Zoom. “We weren’t people, we were little boxes,” she said of the screen time.

In a New York Times Q&A published days earlier, Straight was asked: “Do you worry that readers won’t want to relive the pandemic in a pandemic novel?”

Her reply began: “Yes. But it’s still in our souls … Our memories will be indelible.”

Her first draft, as is her practice, was written in longhand on yellow legal pads. She felt lucky to have an outlet for the emotions she was feeling, the things she was witnessing or hearing about.

“People in my community died,” Straight told us, “and we didn’t get to say goodbye to them.”

She had a further reflection on the unreality of the era.

“COVID was the first time we got judged for being sick,” Straight said. She came down with COVID-19 three times. People asked about it, each question carrying disapproval.

“Nobody during the Spanish flu was asked why they got it,” Straight said. “They just prayed they didn’t get it.”