As told to Paul Little.
2005 was a year of two halves: before and after Hurricane Katrina. For everyone who lived in New Orleans, as I did then, this is how life breaks down, just as lives in Christchurch are defined as before and after the earthquakes.
We'd recently moved to Louisiana when I got a temporary job at Tulane University. In March I interviewed for a permanent job. If I hadn't got it, we would have had to leave New Orleans after the storm closed the university, because they got rid of everyone who wasn't permanent.
Before the storm I went to Shanghai for the first time to do research for my second novel, Hibiscus Coast, published that October. And it was the year of my parents' last visit to me in the US. We went on incredible road trips to San Antonio and to places in the Florida panhandle, later destroyed by wind and water. I had no idea that we were entering the last decade of my parents' lives, that we had less than 10 years left together.
Before the storm hit in August, we evacuated to central Louisiana. Shelters were overflowing. Nothing was organised. People opened homes, factories, churches and carparks to evacuees. It was a surreal and difficult time.