Andre Dubus III signs TOWNIE: A MEMOIR

From Dear Reader: 

Andre Dubus III has achieved some fame as a writer, through his books, House of Sand and Fog and The Garden of Last Days.   The son and namesake of a famous writer (not to mention a cousin of James Lee Burke), one might think he grew up in the sort of intellectual and mannerly household where it would be natural, even expected, to grow up as a writer.   We find in Townie, however, that young Dubus' father was in absentia, and his mother had to work and scrimp to put food on the table for her four children.   They lived in an impoverished neighborhood of a Massachusetts mill town where young Andre, as the older boy of the family, soon learned that the only way to protect himself and his family was through violence.   Fight after fight (some reviewer will count them specifically) are described in detail here, and gave Andre what he eventually recognizes as "a hangover of the spirit, as if all those punches and kicks had pushed you into a gray and treeless landscape where love and forgiveness were hard to find."   How Andre and his family make their way into the world is a stunning and remarkable journey -- for them and for his readers. RH