Loneliness, isolation, fear, relationship stress—Susan Straight juggles a lot of themes in Sacrament, which explores the quiet heroism of first responders, familial resilience, and finding joy and humor where we can. SLO Country Libraries, Cuesta College, and the Paso Robles City Library chose her novel as Book of the Year—an annual literary event that invites the community to read and participate in a countywide book club with an artist talk on Tuesday, April 28, at Cuesta College.
Read the book, meet the author
SLO County Public Libraries, Cuesta College, and Paso Robles City Library invite people across the Central Coast to read Susan Straight’s new novel, Sacrament, set in Southern California during the first year of a pandemic. It highlights ICU nurses’ lives, other first responders, and their families. Straight discusses her novel at Cuesta College on Tuesday, April 28 (5 to 7 p.m.; $20 at tickets.cuesta.edu; students are free). A book signing will follow.
Sacrament follows a group of nurses working in a San Bernardino hospital during COVID-19’s early days as they care for acutely ill patients. To keep their loved ones safe, they isolate themselves in RVs a few blocks from the hospital. The story also explores the effects on their spouses and children.
It’s filled with engrossing and insightful detail. A nurse sleeping in her RV hears the beep-beep-beep of a backing truck and jolts awake thinking an IV line has come out, another washes her scrubs in a rundown laundromat: “Nobody wants to get near me when they see my scrubs, baby. The plague.” They leave their RV doors unlocked in case they get sick so someone can reach them. You can see and feel the results of constantly wearing PPE.
Despite their challenges, the characters find joy too.
“I was trying to find some levity in the bad old days, that’s for sure,” Straight said during a recent phone call. “My next-door neighbor was in the first 100 people in California to get documented COVID. A lot of my neighbors had COVID. I had COVID. I took care of my elderly dad, who also had Parkinson’s. When I took him to the hospital, I got COVID even though I was vaccinated. There were so many strains.”
She modeled the fictional hospital on Riverside Community Hospital. Her house is three blocks away.
“It’s the hospital where I was born and my cousin and our kids. In Riverside, I’m surrounded by hundreds of people I’ve known my whole life, and a lot of my friends are nurses in this neighborhood. There were three nurses on my block alone. On the next block was a dear friend, Marcia Bales, I’ve known for 35 years, and she’s a head nurse and teaching nurse. They would all walk by and talk to me after their shifts. My neighbors Sean and Tammy would get off shift from the ER and walk down to my corner, and they’d be holding red Solo cups full of wine, and they’d tell me these things that happened.”
Straight also met traveling nurses who rented rooms nearby or lived in RVs.
“They told me a lot about how it felt to be overwhelmed by patient families, because, for all that time, people were alone, and you couldn’t go to the ICU to see your loved one; you couldn’t even sit in the waiting room.”
From the description, it’s clear Straight loves where she lives. She’s spent her whole life there except for when she went to university—she got a scholarship to USC—and grad school, where she studied under famed writer and activist James Baldwin at the University of Massachusetts.
“I was writing these stories set in a place like my Southern California, and everyone in graduate school was much older than me. ‘Oh, what’s this? It isn’t Hollywood and it’s not the beach.’ They were quite dismissive of it, and pretty mean. But James Baldwin told me, when it was just the two of us after he had read my first short story collection, ‘It is imperative that you write about your place because this is clearly what you love,’ so that was a big deal for me. I think people make fun of California, don’t they? They definitely talk about Southern California specifically. Certainly, they talk about places like San Bernardino and and the Coachella Valley in specific ways, but—yeah—I love it very much.”
Sacrament is populated by Black characters, Latinos, Filipinos, Indigenous people. She’s not striving for inclusivity. It’s Straight’s experience.
“It’s just my actual day-to-day life. I’m usually the only blond person anywhere. In my classroom at UC Riverside, I’m probably the only blond person. I grew up around so many people who are mixed race. I went to a wedding two weeks ago for a former student, Daniel Lopez, and he’s third generation Mexican American. There were probably 80 people at the wedding, at a mobile home park, and I was the only white person at the whole wedding. ‘Oh, that’s Daniel’s professor.’ I went in the kitchen and helped his mom serve barbacoa. It’s how you live when you live in a place like mine.”
Speaking of food, this novel will make you hungry. Food is everywhere. Again, it’s a reflection of Straight’s life.
“I bake really well, so I bake cakes and cookies and lots of things for everybody, but yes, my neighbor Johnny and his wife will bring over pozole; Mario, next door, they always make tamales, and my neighbor; Jose, who’s originally from Ensenada, right down the street, he has Friday night tacos. Also, I have so many Filipino friends, and I grew up eating lumpia and confit. My mom, being from Switzerland, would make this bread from Switzerland call züpfe, shaped like a braid. So, for my kids, they thought that’s how all bread should be shaped.”
Sacrament is a gripping read and beautifully constructed with alternating and overlapping points of view and flashbacks in time through characters’ memories.
“In high school, on my own, I read Toni Morrison and James Baldwin,” she explained. “James Baldwin has much of that same kind of style. I couldn’t believe I got to study with him because I had read so many of his things. Go Tell It on the Mountain, a seminal James Baldwin book, has multiple narrators.”
Straight writes big stories about big, diverse communities.
“I think for writers like Toni Morrison—and Louise Erdrich does this too—we like the polyphonic novel, the one that has multiple points of view. To read a novel and imagine yourself as someone else is the best thing you can do as a human because you walk around looking at the world through different eyes, and you say, ‘Well, I know nothing about that person who’s walking down the sidewalk.’
“Also, reading fiction allows us a use our own imagination. Narrative storytelling is what we do as humans.” ∆
Contact Arts Editor Glen Starkey at gstarkey@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in April 16-23, 2026.