Chris Casey – Author of Bruin’s Wake

I get e-mails and texts all the time asking me ‘who exactly is Paul Bruin?’ and ‘what exactly is Bruin’s Wake?’ Most of the questions come from either my growing fan base or just curious individuals anxious to know why Paul Bruin wants to friend them on Facebook. Well, to answer their inquiries, Paul Bruin is an amalgamation of several different individuals I grew up with in Memphis, TN. Suffice to say, Paul Bruin is not an exact, cloned, carbon copy of myself but rather a mixture of several different characters, myself being one of them. Many of the experiences Paul Bruin faces in the book, actually happened in the author’s life including, but not limited to, attending a private Catholic high school in Memphis, joining the Marine Corps at the age of 18, running a marathon, playing major college football, writing the Great American Novel and having been falsely accused and wrongly convicted of a crime. Paul’s enemies are numerous, mean and vindictive. The major players include Brian Gowan, a former high school friend of Paul’s who has inherited the beautiful gene from his mother and the stupid gene from his father and who can’t seem to find a way to stop disrupting Paul’s life in any way he can. Next there’s Allison Tressle, the lie-mongering , local newswoman who fiends for sex and unearned money. Under highly suspicious circumstances, she becomes Paul’s stepmother in the book by marrying Paul’s widower father, George Bruin, and is a non-stop schemer, much like her attention-seeking ,real-life counterparts. Dick Cordella, the Germantown Police Officer, is the pistol-packing homosexual who has had it in for Paul ever since hacking into his wife’s e-mail account and discovering all the lurid messages Paul has sent her. Dick fulfills an important role throughout the book. It is his specific actions, words and tomfoolery that will eventually absolve Paul and subsequently the author from any and all wrongdoing, supposed shenanigans and felonious behavior. Finally, there is Clinton Weeks, the meth-addicted maniac who murders Paul Bruin’s beloved mother during Paul’s junior year of high school. Clinton is arrested in Part 1 of Bruin’s Wake, only to escape in Part 2, reuniting with his mother, super-dyke Tura Weeks, in Part 3. Clinton is about as stupid and senseless as they come, bragging non-stop about all the drugs he’s done in his lifetime and continuing to make meth even while on the lam. He does however possess one burning passion. To get even with the one person, both he and his cellmate back in federal prison, want dead: Paul Bruin.

So you see Bruin’s Wake really is the story of Paul Bruin, an enigmatic character who traipses from one adventure to the next. Horseshoe Lake, Arkansas. The ‘Mad’ County Jail. Florida State University. Oxford, Mississippi. They’re all the places Paul leaves a little bit of himself in his ‘wake’ and they’re all stops on the road leading back to Memphis as a Confederacy of Dunces aims to bring him down. But will pride, his greatest nemesis of all, finally get the best of him?

Paul Bruin is not a real person, per se, but the things that befall him all are, or at least people can relate to them.
Now, Bruin’s Wake, is the story of Paul Bruin, again, an enigmatic character who traipses from one adventure to the next.

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