“I really wrestle with this whole notion of what a modern man is. I find it an endlessly fascinating subject.” —Andre Dubus III
Andre Dubus III wrote about his personal history with violence in his memoir, Townie. Watch his Big Think interview and then participate in the Goodreads Live Chat today (3/16) at 5PM (est) / 2PM (pst).
A lot of what’s in my “accidental memoir”, I’ve tried to write as a novel three separate times over nearly thirty years: growing up in the shadow of the Vietnam war; living with a single mother in poverty; having sex way too young (13), and the drugs, the alcohol, the violence and very few men around, especially my father. But every time I tried to capture all this as fiction, it was just too close to my literal life experience, which then somehow choked the life out of the fiction. I think I knew so much about what I was writing about that I was not allowing any real level of discovery to happen, which for me is what descending into the dream world of fiction is all about: not telling a story I already know, but trying to find one I don’t know.
Andre Dubus III, interviewed in Litstack
“We are two hours out of Sydney when the pilot’s voice comes over the PA system. ‘Ladies and Gentlemen,’ he begins, ‘I’m sorry to tell you this, but our instruments up here are indicating fuel system failure. We’re on the phone with central in Chicago—they are advising us—and we’ve contacted Sydney air traffic to let them know we’re headed back. You can probably tell we’re making a big turn right now, and we’re going to get you on the ground just as quickly as we can.’”
Contents May Have Shifted: A Novel by Pam Houston
“It is enough to enter
the templar
halls of museums, for
example, or
the chambers of churches,
and admire
no more than beauty
there, or
remember the graveness
of stone, or
whatever”
Pitch: Poems by Todd Boss
“(1989) Please, she whispers, how may I help you? The screen lights up with her voice. A room you enter, numbers your fingers, heated, sterile almost. The phone beside her never rings, like a toy, like a prop. My father lifts the receiver in the night, speaks into it, asks, Where’s the money? asks, Why can’t I sleep? asks, Who left me outside? The phone rings on a desk when he lifts it, the desk somewhere in Texas, someone is always supposed to be at that desk but no one ever is, not at night. A machine speaks while my father tries to speak, it doesn’t listen, it only speaks, my father’s face reflected dimly in the screen.”
Being Flynn by Nick Flynn
“I did not look into the mirror, not yet, not in the morning. My body was still so small and I only looked at it right after the weights when my muscles were filled with blood. There came the tap of my father’s horn outside. We were going running together, but what about shoes? All I owned were a pair of Dingo boots, the square-toed kind with the brass ring cinched in at the ankle. The horn tapped again.”
Townie: A Memoir by Andre Dubus III
“There is a good chance you bought this book online. You may have even researched it and placed the order at work. You knew that, technically, you’re not supposed to prowl Amazon on company time, but you have become so good at using the Internet to multitask that you also know that a half hour of title browsing in the office will ultimately have little effect on your day’s productivity.”
Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality by Elias Aboujaoude
“For I was born, too, in the stunted winter of History.
For I, too, desired the Lion’s mouth split
& the world that is not ours, and the wounded children
set free to their turnstiles of wonder. I, too, have
blinked speechless at the valleys of corpses, wished
Scriabin’s ‘Black Mass’ in the Executioner’s ear.”
Holding Company: Poems by Major Jackson
MCNALLY JACKSON PRESENTS:
Andre Dubus III in conversation with John Burnham Schwartz
Friday, Feb. 3 at 7PM
52 Prince Street, New York, NY
”’Townie’ is the story of how Dubus made the journey to his own writer’s life, and also of how he almost didn’t make it. Unsparing and occasionally brutal, but never bitter, it’s an exceptionally eloquent depiction of something many Americans have experienced in the past three years: what it feels like to be left behind.” —Laura Miller, Salon
Enter to win a free copy of Townie in paperback from Goodreads.
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Andre Dubus III • Townie: A Memoir
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
“I was a raging, violent kid and it was finding, for me, creative writing which gave me a way into all the other symphonic feelings a human being has. I came alive.”
—Andre Dubus III, author of Townie: A Memoir, speaking on the “What’s Up With Men” panel at the Boston Book Festival.
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this last project for our father. I stood and brushed the crumbs and sawdust off of my legs. I walked up, opened the lid, climbed onto the table, then stepped inside and lay down. I asked Jeb to close it, told him I wanted to make sure there was enough room for a body inside. These are the words I said, and part of me was thinking that, but another part of me had to feel what our father would not, had to see what he would not, the new lid closing, then the darkness, the nearly milky-sweet scent of drying glue, the sap and the sawdust, the walls of this final box at my fingers and toes.
Andre Dubus III, Townie: A Memoir
Becoming a writer helped Andre Dubus III forge a relationship with his father, but making himself completely whole took more. (Michele McDonald/ Globe Staff/ File 1992)
