Townie: A Memoir - Hardcover

Andre Dubus III

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393064662 ISBN 13: 9780393064667

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co., 2011

Synopsis

After their parents divorced in the 1970s, Andre Dubus III and his three siblings grew up with their exhausted working mother in a depressed Massachusetts mill town saturated with drugs and everyday violence. To protect himself and those he loved, Andre started pumping iron and learned to use his fists so well that he became the kind of man who could send others to the hospital with one punch, and did. Irresistibly drawn to stand up for the underdog, he was on a fast track to getting killed-or killing someone else. Nearby, his father, an eminent author, taught on a college campus and took the kids out on Sundays. The clash of worlds between town and gown, between the hard drinking, drugging, and fighting of "townies" and the ambitions of well-fed students debating books and ideas, couldn't have been more stark or more difficult for a son to communicate to a father. Only by finally putting pen to paper himself did young Andre come into his own, discovering the power of empathy in channeling the stories of others-and ultimately bridging the rift between his father and himself. An unforgettable book, Townie is a riveting and profound meditation on physical violence and the failures and triumphs of love.

About this title

Review:

Amazon.com Best Books of the Month, February 2011: Rarely has the process of becoming a writer seemed as organic and--dare I say it--moral as it does in Andre Dubus III's clear-eyed and compassionate memoir, Townie. You might think that following his father's trade would have been natural and even obvious for the son and namesake of Andre Dubus, one of the most admired short story writers of his time, but it was anything but. His father left when he was 10, and as his mother worked long hours to keep them fed, her four children mostly raised themselves, stumbling through house parties and street fights in their Massachusetts mill town, so cut off from the larger world that when someone mentioned "Manhattan" when Andre was in college he didn't know what they were talking about. What he did know, and what he recalls with detailed intensity, were the battles in bars and front yards, brutal to men and women alike, that first gave him discipline, as he built himself from a fearful kid into a first-punch, hair-trigger bruiser, and then empathy, as, miraculously, he pulled himself back from the violence that threatened to define him. And it was out of that empathy that, wanting to understand the stories of the victims of brutality as well as those whose pain drove them to dish it out, he began to write, reconciling with his father and eventually giving us novels like House of Sand and Fog and now this powerful and big-hearted memoir. --Tom Nissley, Amazon.com

[ ... ] Townie is a mesmerising work, one of the best accounts I've encountered of violence and its causes. It is worth reading just for Dubus's lengthy descriptions of fighting passages that exhilarate even as they sicken. --William Skidelsky, Observer

Townie is riveting and poignant. The writing is crisp and lively Dubus seems fixated with the smell of the air --Ángel Gurría-Quintana, FT

About the Author:

National Book Award finalist Andre Dubus III is the author of The Garden of Last Days and House of Sand and Fog.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co.
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0393064662
• ISBN 13: 9780393064667
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400