<b>"Buoyant humor...richly complex friendships and romantic relationships...moments that stir real emotion." </b>
With wit and an eye for the unexpected, writer and private eye Faron shares her coming-of-age quest to shake off a fundamentalist upbringing in the early 1970s, vividly capturing the challenge of self-discovery in a dangerous world. Traveling mostly alone, she faced assault, poverty, language barriers, and punishing jobs.
When the free ferry that connected Fay Faron’s Algiers Point community to New Orleans’ French Quarter found itself on the chopping block, the former private investigator used her skills to research the history of the service and to organize protests against its demise. In her work to keep the ferry going, especially for the hospitality workers who use it to commute to their jobs, Faron, 73, often dressed as the “Ferry Godmother” to call attention to the cause. Here’s how Faron’s role evolved.
Fay Faron: In 2001, I sold my detective agency in San Francisco and moved to Algiers Point, a quiet New Orleans neighborhood that was a short, free ferry ride from the French Quarter. A lot of my new neighbors depended on the ferry to get to work. After Hurricane Katrina, the state transportation department announced that it would be cutting the ferry’s hours — stopping service at 10 p.m. That would have left a lot of restaurant workers unable to get to their shifts, since the hospitality business runs 24/7. So I decided to rally some neighbors to protest the cuts, and we got the state to back down. That’s how our nonprofit, Friends of the Ferry, got started.
