Cover To Cover is the anchor program for GPB’s literary coverage. Cover To Cover features a collection of distinctive Southern voices interviewing Georgia writers, Southern writers, and writers dealing with the South. The GPB Southern Lit Cadre will provide you with a varied, weekly glimpse at fiction, non-fiction, history, poetry, and even the occasional ‘old school’ nod to Flannery O’Connor or William Faulkner.

Friday, January 23, 2009

John Dufresne's Requiem Mass


GPB's Jesse Freeman interviews John Dufresne, author of Requiem, Mass on Cover to Cover this week:

Requiem, Mass. is the tale of 8th grade boy struggling to keep his family together despite the lies of his absent father and the delusions of his pathological mother. It’s also the tale of that same boy, grown to be a writer and teacher, struggling to save his adult sister from the residuals of the tumultuous childhood they shared. It is on these two planes that our narrator, John, entertains and edifies with rip-roaring humor and breathtaking pathos.

It is also on these two planes that fiction and memoir converge. See, John Dufresne is that writer/professor with the mixed up family, and his writing is perhaps so poignant and powerful because it inspired by the real-life obstacles he’s been confronted with throughout his life.

In our interview, Dufresne is surprisingly forthcoming about the aspects of memoir that permeate this novel. He talks about what is real and what isn’t, and about the precarious gray area that he has created by couching this work as a novel. Truth, it seems, is indeed stranger than fiction. Airing this Sunday at 8:00PM, its GPB's Cover to Cover. Tune in!
Posted by at