John Dufresne

In this blog, I write about people who have changed my life. Experiences I’ve shared with friends and neighbors alike. Sad, funny, touching stories that have shaped me into the person I am now. Out of all the people who have impacted me, both significantly and slightly, one persons words changed my life more than anyone else’s.

I was assigned to read a book by John Dufresne last semester for my short story writing class. “The Lie That Tells A Truth,” is a book about writing technique and how to become a better writer. But more than just that, it’s also largely about John’s life.

Junior year was the hardest scholastic year of my life. The workload was overwhelming from classes alone, and while I wasn’t studying, I was trying to remain un-fired from two separate jobs. I was working more than forty hours per week and had hardly any time to go out and get drunk at night like most college students. Despite my stress about school and work, the end of the year was creeping ever closer, as was the end of my college experience. I was continually and glaringly aware of the “light” at the end of the tunnel. What the HELL was I going to do after I graduated? The thought loomed in the back of my mind all year long, and trust me, it’s still there, although, it isn’t as glaring since I read John’s book.

I flipped through the book casually, hardly paying attention to his words since it was an assigned book. I may not have read the whole thing from cover to cover, but one passage stood out at me. Whether I was paying particular attention that day, or whether his words rang so clear as my eyes passed over them that I automatically focused, I’m not sure. But the passage was burned into my brain and evidently meant so much to me that I later (currently) wrote about it.

You get to revise your life again and again until you’re living the life you set out to live. You get to examine yourself, and if you’re not doing what you want to be doing, you get to start over. You create the world you want to live in, and you go there. No one else gets to write your story. Every day is an opening sentence, a new beginning. Every morning is a new youth, every afternoon an aging, every sleep a little death. And in every sleep, the dreams you have deferred will haunt you.
 I read it again and again, over and over. A weight was lifted off my shoulders. Not only did the thought of a JOB after college now sound insignificant, but the passage made me reanalyze my whole life. I, and only I, am in utter control of my own life and what happens to me. I constantly worry about making mistakes and what will happen to me and ultimately ending up unhappy. But after reading John’s passage, I looked at my life in a new light. If ever I’m unhappy, I thought to myself, I’ll just find a way, do something, that will make me happy again. It’s as simple as that.


In the beginning of second semester, John came to campus and spoke in the college auditorium. I went to see his speech and the whole time he was speaking, I stared at him and thought….You are the wisest man I know and you’ll never know how you changed the way I thought about my life.