Writer Amanda Fortini is best known around here for her coverage of the Oct. 1, 2017, massacre in The New Yorker, and for an essay about Las Vegas in The Believer. She’s channeled that momentum into “Flamingo Road,” a book in progress about Las Vegas. Currently a Beverly Rogers Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute, Fortini will read from “Flamingo Road” on Thursday at UNLV.
Is there a story behind that title?
“I lived in an apartment on Flamingo Road for four and a half years, before moving downtown in early 2020. At one point, when I was in the early stages of thinking about writing a book, I gave someone who was sending me a package from New York my address, and she said, ‘Flamingo Road! That’s quite an address.’ Later that afternoon, it came to me in a flash: That’s the title of my book. I like that it has personal resonance for me, but also historical significance for the city I’m writing about, in that the Flamingo, the first major luxury casino in Las Vegas, is located there. The name also feels, like Las Vegas, at once glamorous and prosaic, colorful yet pedestrian.”
Was there an aha moment that convinced you there was a book to be written?
“I was recently going through a journal I kept in my early days in Las Vegas, and the very first line, which I didn’t remember writing, is that I need to remember all the details I’m seeing so that I can write a book — so I guess the impulse was there from the start. But I didn’t begin to think seriously about writing one until I had reported several pieces about the shooting; I realized that I might have something longer in me about this place that I found endlessly fascinating, troubling, and inspiring. Still, the notion didn’t crystallize until I published my essay, “The People of Las Vegas.” So many people wrote to me to say that it felt like an accurate portrayal of the city they knew that I finally thought, ‘Ok, I can do this.’”
You split your time between Las Vegas and Montana; what does that extra distance mean in terms of writing about this city?
“For the first few years I was in Las Vegas, I spent most of my time here, so much that my friends and neighbors in Montana began to ask me if I ‘lived in Las Vegas now.’ The pandemic changed the equation slightly, in that I had to spend more time in Montana for family reasons. But my book is reported, and I also prefer to write about Las Vegas with the hum of the city around me, so much of “Flamingo Road” has been — and will be, as I’m still working on it — written here. That said, leaving and returning to a place tends to help keep one’s perspective fresh, which is useful for a writer. Also useful for a writer? No one ever knowing where to find you.”
