Townie: A Memoir
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Andre Dubus III, author of the National Book Awardânominated House of Sand and Fog and The Garden of Last Days, reflects on his violent past and a lifestyle that threatened to destroy himâuntil he was saved by writing.
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 crime. To protect himself and those he loved from street violence, Andre learned to use his fists so well that he was even scared of himself. He was on a fast track to getting killedâor killing someone elseâor to beatings-for-pay as a boxer.
Nearby, his father, an eminent author, taught on a college campus and took the kids out on Sundays. The clash of worlds couldnât have been more starkâor more difficult for a son to communicate to a father. Only by becoming a writer himself could Andre begin to bridge the abyss and save himself. His memoir is a riveting, visceral, profound meditation on physical violence and the failures and triumphs of love.
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Andre Dubus III is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Townie and the #1 New York Times bestselling novel House of Sand and Fog. Townie made the list of the best books of 2011 for Esquire, Salon, Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, Washington Examiner, and AudioFile. House of Sand and Fog, the basis for an Academy Awardânominated motion picture, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Book Sense Book of the Year, and an Oprah Book Club selection. Dubus has taught writing at Harvard, Tufts, and Emerson College and is a faculty member at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.
