SOURCE: "'The Whole Lying Opera of It': Dreams, Lies, and Confessions in the Fiction of Barry Hannah," in The Mississippi Quarterly, Vol. XLIV, No. 4, Fall, 1991, pp. 411-28.

In the following essay, Weston focuses on issues of identity and self-worth in Hannah's male protagonists.

In an interview for a 1984 volume of Contemporary Authors [Volume 110], Jan Gretlund asked Barry Hannah about the extent of his religious beliefs; and Hannah replied, "If I said that I believed in God, what would it mean? I proceed from the fact that there has been a great lie to me, from the word go. Somebody stands in the pulpit and says, 'I've just talked to God.' You get a little lonely when you realize that's not right, at about sixteen. There's something too frantic about the present religious fervor, especially on TV …" This oblique response to Gretlund's question, with its jump-cut to the...