Sat. Oct. 15

 Andre Dubus III reads from “Townie” Saturday Oct. 15 at the Old South Church Sanctuary at 4:30, part of the Boston Book Festival. He'll join Stephen McCauley, Tom Matlack and Jabari Asim with moderator Tom Ashbrook on a forum called  "What's Up With Men?" 

This is an expanded version I did for the Boston Herald in February as the memoir was about to be published.

       Dubus had just driven from his home in Newbury to the Tap in Haverhill, an old stomping ground when he was much younger. Dubus was beaming.
    “I lost my fighting virginity in this room,” the novelist said Tuesday afternoon, walking around the restaurant-club, trying to place the exact point of the fisticuffs 34 years ago. “The very first punch I threw in a fight, ever.”
    It’s something, he said, the boy in him takes pride in. The 51-year-old man is rather ashamed.
    As a kid, he, his mother and his three siblings moved frequently in and around Haverhill, living a hardscrabble existence and searching for ever-cheaper rents. Sometimes, they moved three times a year. He was scrawny and always the new kid in school, a target for bullies. 
    But when he was 14 he began extensive weight training, which also built confidence.
     Three years later at the Tap, a guy he knew was roughing up his younger brother, Jeb.
   “My brother got brutalized and that was the last straw,” Dubus said, over coffee. “I had changed my body. I’d gone from soft and small to hard and strong. This badass does a number on my brother and I knocked his front teeth out. I was off and running in my little fighting career. I was a fighter about 13 years, and I frankly got really good at violence.”
   His “fighting career” is not his real career, of course. Dubus – “rhymes with abuse,” said the author - came to success, fame and fortune with the novels, “House of Sand and Fog” in 2003 and “The Garden of Last Days” in 2008. Now, “Townie: A Memoir.”
   Dubus called it an “accidental memoir.” He’d hope to write a fictionalized account of his life, but it just didn’t work. So, he ended up revisiting his past in painstaking detail. It’s not quite “Angela’s Ashes,” but it’s far from a pretty picture.
   “I felt no judgment writing this, no anger,” Dubus said. “I was just trying to capture as honestly as I could the feelings at that time. My mother told me, ‘Honey, don’t you ever not write anything because of me. That’s your story. You write whatever you feel you should write.’ I was moved to tears with her generosity.”
    “One of the things I found fascinating in writing this whole thing was it didn’t feel that different from writing a novel,” he added. “I felt myself very soon in the grips of some narrative arc. You drill down into your own psyche, your imagination, with the characters and the situations and then you hit this underground current and it starts to pull you on its own in this direction.”
   Finding that he could write, Dubus said, saved his life. “Once I discovered it in my early 20s, I realized I had to do it to remain who I was. When I finished writing that first story, I felt more like me than I’d ever felt in my life. I was just shy of 22 years old. And I’ve been doing it six days a week ever since.”
    In “Townie,” he wrestles with the rage that drove him over the edge, and drives him still, up to a point.
   “I just heard this on the radio a half hour ago,” Dubus said. “Psychologists were being interviewed about children who are abused and bullied and they were saying males tend to go through a hyper-masculine stage. It was interesting to hear that, because that’s just what I did.”
    He hasn’t thrown a punch in 23 years.
    “Here I am,” Dubus said, “this [UMass-Lowell] college professor-author-homeowner-father-husband-man of responsibility-baseball fan-taxpayer, but there’s still that boy in there, that young man who learned how to throw punches. And there’s still the guy who hates mean people. I hate cruelty and I really have a hair trigger about it. If I see an injustice, I still rail. I’ve been able to avoid physical violence, but I have not been able to avoid confrontation. Somebody parks in a handicap parking space, I’ll talk to them.”
    In “Townie,” he also writes, unflinchingly, about his family, particularly his father, the late short story writer also named Andre Dubus.cq His parents divorced when Dubus was 10. Though he lived and taught at nearby Bradford College, his father was not a major presence while growing up.
   “He wasn’t a deadbeat dad,” Dubus said. “He was as poor as we were. But he was not a present father, either.”
    The senior Dubus achieved considerable acclaim but limited financial success. His son said when he was young he never thought about following in his dad’s footsteps.
    “Like a lot of kids,” Dubus said, “I hardly knew what my father did. I was an ignorant little teen. I didn’t read his books. And I was so ignorant, the first short story I wrote for publication I just signed ‘Andre Dubus,’ forgetting there was already one out there. But the next 20 years certainly taught me there was another Andre Dubus out there. I began to read his work and he’s one of my favorite writers. We all get a hand of cards to play and I’m a great writer’s son with the same name. There are worse problems.”
     “The very first short story I read of his was, “Killings,” which was later adapted into the film ‘In the Bedroom.’ I remember going for a walk after finishing it and thinking it had the power of the ‘The Grapes of Wrath.’ And it was a 21-page story. I couldn’t quite figure that out. How could my father have written something so beautiful?”
    Dubus’ relationship with his father was complicated. He hopes his depiction in “Townie” won’t damage the esteem his father is held in by fans.
    “Some of his devotees have confused the art with the artist,” Dubus said. “His work is wise, characterized by such compassion. There’s almost a divine light suffused through some of his dark stories. They assume the man is equally wise, compassionate and divine. But he could be a son of a bitch. He couldn’t stay loyal to a wife or a girlfriend if it killed him. He had a temper, had all these flaws, but the truth is, the art is larger than the artist. He’d be the first to tell you that.”
    “My father wrote a beautiful essay about how the writer, when he’s at his or her desk, needs to bring the highest human qualities, Then, the rest of the day is just normal, relaxed. It was after I became a father, that I realized just how little I was fathered.”
   Dubus is married to Fontaine Dollas Dubus. They have three children, two in high school and one in college.
    When he was younger, Dubus worked as a carpenter, bartender and halfway house counselor. He studied sociology and Marxist theory at the University of Texas in Austin and the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
    “I went from being a guy who fought with his fist to a guy who wanted to fight all cruelty,” Dubus said, of his education. “I’m still a left-wing injustice-hating guy, but the downside of Marxist theory was I began to see people in groups. Writing brought me to see people as individual human beings.”
      His father suffered a crippling accident in 1986. After stopping on the highway to aid another motorist in a collision, he was hit by a swerving car. He had a leg amputated and was confined to a wheelchair. The father and son became closer after the accident.
   In 1999, as Dubus’ breakthrough book, “House of Sand of Fog,” was published, his father died from a heart attack. Standing at his graveside service, some punks in a low rider drove by and screamed an epithet at the small party. Dubus said it took all he had to not jump in a car, chase them, and give them a beatdown.
   “It goes back to that 14-year-old boy I was,” Dubus said. “There’s a narcissistic element, where I could not bear inhabiting the skin of a coward. I could not bear my own reflection of myself to myself. And that made me do really dangerous destructive things for years. I’m in this netherworld. I still go from zero to 100. Either I’m going to be Gandhi cqor Billy Jack.cq I’m still the kind of guy who will stick my face in situations, but I refuse to start throwing punches again.”
Free.

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