Townie: A Memoir

“At once a sorrowful tale of loss and one man’s extraordinary path to a peaceful life…One of the most balanced, reflective, thoughtful books I’ve read to date. This addresses a wide range of topics with grace and depth.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“Townie is a resolute story about the forging of a writer in fire and blood and a wrenching journey through the wreckage of New England’s lost factory world during the Vietnam War era…Dubus chronicles each traumatic incident and realization in stabbing detail. So chiseled are his dramatic memories, his shocking yet redemptive memoir of self-transformation feels like testimony under oath as well as hard-hammered therapy, coalescing, ultimately, in a generous, penetrating, and cathartic dissection of misery and fury, creativity and forgiveness, responsibility and compassion.” —Booklist (starred review)

“The author grew up poor in Massachusetts mill towns, the oldest of four children of the celebrated short-story writer Andre Dubus (1936–1999), who abandoned the family in 1968 to pursue a young student. Beautifully written and bursting with life, the book tells the story of a boy struggling to express his “hurt and rage,” first through violence aimed at school and barroom bullies and ultimately through the power of words. Weak and shy as he entered his teens, Dubus III lived with his mother and siblings in run-down houses in crime-ridden neighborhoods, where they ate canned food for dinner and considered occasional “mystery” car rides to nowhere special with their mother a big treat. While his mother was at work, young toughs hung out at his house doing drugs. At 16, he began training with weights and grew strong to fight his tormenters, and he became a vicious brawler in a leather jacket and ponytail. Meanwhile, at nearby Bradford College, his father taught, striding across campus in his neatly trimmed beard and Australian cowboy hats. The elder Dubus sent money home and took the children out on Sundays, but otherwise remained out of touch. He eventually went through many young women and three broken marriages. At Bradford, which he entered as a student, Dubus III was known only as his father’s son, “such a townie.” Although the author stopped expecting anything from his father, he yearned for the connection that finally came years later when he helped care for the elder Dubus after the 1986 car accident that crushed his legs. By then, Dubus III had found a new way to draw on the anger of the “semi-abandoned,” turning his punches into sentences. His compassionate memoir abounds with exquisitely rendered scenes of fighting, cheating, drugging, drinking and loving.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“[Dubus’] reading is fluid and convincing, adding an intimacy to the account, making the listening especially cathartic.” —Publishers Weekly (audio review)

“Dubus’ even voice wonderfully conveys the teenager’s formidable fighting experiences as well as the uncanny flashes of insight that led him to relinquish the urge to fight and to focus on his own writing.” —AudioFile

“Compelling, riveting, gritty, and astonishingly moving, Dubus’ memoir, Townie, achieves that rarest of qualities: it makes us love the boy who becomes the man.” —Anita Shreve, author of Rescue

“In this powerful memoir, Andre Dubus III explores the complicated and intense relationships between siblings, mothers and sons, and fathers and sons. Growing up in hardscrabble old mill towns, Dubus learned to fight and survive and ultimately to find his own glorious voice…as Dubus finds his redemptive place in the world at last.” —Ann Hood, bestselling author of The Red Thread

“Townie is a better, harder book than anything the younger Mr. Dubus has yet written; it pays off on every bet that’s been placed on him. It’s a sleek muscle car of a memoir that…growls like an amalgam of the best work by Richard Price, Stephen King, Ron Kovic, Breece D’J Pancake, and Dennis Lehane, set to the desolate thumping of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town.’ It could become, and I mean this fondly, one hell of a Ben Affleck movie.” —New York Times

“Powerful…[A] fine memoir.” —New York Times Book Review

“This harrowing and strange and beautiful book is one of paternal absence, of spiritual hollowness, of exacting strife and blatant violence and, finally, of a hard-wrought and grace-filled redemption…This book marks an important moment in the growing body of Dubus’ work. Here he reconciles as intimately and exactingly as possible the troubled—and ultimately redeemed—relationship he had with his father. And here he moves into the fatherless life of the mature artist, the one staking his claim to his own world of art in words. It is a redemptive world, one filled with a deep understanding of the power of violence, but invested in the astounding power of love.” —Boston Globe

“In his memoir Townie, Andre Dubus III bravely claims all of the shadows he grew up under—his famous writer father, his parents’ divorce, his newly single mother’s impoverishment, the rough streets of the many working-class New England towns he called home. Fighting saved him for a while; then he put down his fists and picked up a pen. Lucky him, lucky us.” —Elle

“[Dubus’] most searing and terrifying work yet…Townie isn’t a memoir of redemption but of resilience; it’s a fearless narrative of masculinity and fatherhood and of the power and unexpected comfort of blood.” —Men’s Journal

“Grim and gripping.” —USA Today