A Conversation with RICHARD GOODKIN on His Newest Book, MOURNING LIGHT

About MOURNING LIGHT: Set in Madison, Wisconsin, and New Haven, Connecticut, in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, Mourning Light is a semi-autobiographical love story. Our narrator, Reb (so named by his mother because of her love of the Daphne du Maurier novel Rebecca), is hounded by guilt over the death of his lover, Anthony, which took place on the same day Reb first met the handsome yet enigmatic Eric. Once Reb becomes convinced that Anthony has sent him a cryptic message from beyond the grave, he becomes obsessed with figuring out what it could mean.

RICHARD GOODKIN is a professor of French at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He has published five monographs on seventeenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century French literature and a historical novel, written in French, about Molière’s mistress and collaborator, Madeleine Béjart.