Alt-Weekly Editor is Main Character in Katrina Novel
By AAN Staff
august 20, 2008 10:07 am
Tom Piazza's new novel
City of Refuge, released yesterday by Harper books, features an editor of a fictional New Orleans alt-weekly named
Gumbo who evacuates to Chicago after Hurricane Katrina. As the
Times-Picayune points out, that character "certainly bears a resemblance to Michael Tisserand, former
Gambit editor." But Piazza explains that all the characters are fictional. "Even if a writer is writing a novel about his or her best friend, in the course of that writing, the friend turns into something else -- a character," he says. When asked about the resemblance,
Tisserand tells Gambit that "the scaffolding [for the character] is in part me, but the building is all Tom's."