Celebrated authors Andre Dubus III (Townie) and Richard Russo (Empire Falls) sit down to talk about the future of publishing, the slow demise of brick-and-mortar book stores, and Amazon's ploy to control the entire e-book market.

Live Video Chat With Andre Dubus III

When (if ever) is violence necessary? What (if anything) does it have to do with “manhood”? And what toll does a life of violence take on the human spirit?

These questions writhe at the heart of Andre Dubus III’s profound new memoir, Townie. Forced at the age of 11 into the role of “man of the family,” Dubus became a fighter to defend his mother and siblings from predatory thugs in their poverty-stricken town of Lowell, Massachusetts. Now an accomplished novelist (House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days), Dubus reflects on the complicated nature of violence, and what exactly it does to the lives of those it touches.

Is it more difficult to write about real people or fictional characters? 'Empire Falls' author Richard Russo and 'Townie' author Andre Dubus III on their process.

Watch 'Empire Falls' author Richard Russo and 'Townie' author Andre Dubus III discuss how memoir writing differs from their approach to fiction.

Andre Dubus reads from "Townie," and more in this interview from MPR News reporter Euan Kerr, including how Dubus hopes his children will read the book — but not for many years.

Love in class-riven America.

In a recent phone interview, he talked about the nature of memoir and how writing saved him from a life of violence.

Townie, the memoir from The House of Sand and Fog author Andre Dubus III, looks at a rough-and-tumble upbringing in the mill towns of Massachusetts. As the book comes out in paperback, Dubus talks with writer John Burnham Schwartz, whose novels are set in and around the same spots.

Jenn says: "This is one of my all-time favorite memoirs. Dubus writes vividly of his family's financial and emotional struggle and his own journey into and out of violence, as well as the process of discovering his writing gift." Newly released in paperback.

“We watch [Dubus] transform from a terrorized weakling into a bodybuilding freak so jittery with rage that he becomes a kind of messed-up superhero always looking for a good (or at least passable) reason for a fight.

“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.

This is a sleek muscle car of a memoir that growls like an amalgam of 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.” Mr. Dubus is the son of the writer Andre Dubus, a father who wasn’t around for most of the author’s difficult and impoverished childhood. This book could become, and I mean this fondly, one hell of a Ben Affleck movie.

I met Mr. Dubus this spring during his reading tour, and he was kind enough to answer some questions about his new book, his writing habits, and his future projects.

Would we have wanted to read this book had it been by an unknown writer? A man who had not penned a bestselling novel, a man without a famous father?

Yes, we would. For an explanation of how to emerge, if not unscathed, then intact, from a childhood filled with flying fists and screaming rage. For a deeper understanding of what it means to live a life so limited that baseball games and city of Manhattan are unknown to an American boychild. To better understand the real ramifications of divorce on children, particularly male children, who often feel responsible for their families but are unable to act productively on that feeling. To acknowledge that no child, or teenager, for that matter, should be burdened with the weight of adult concerns like food and shelter. To take responsibility for our children and civilize them lest they terrorize others. To gain insight into why social ills like gangs and teenaged drug abuse remain alluring options for so many young people with virtually no other choices. To sit at the feet of a fine writer, and applaud his work.

The most enjoyable parts of the book are where he describes his complicated relationships with his family and step-family. These sections are filled with honest, raw emotions and really give the book a more three-dimensional feel after the long, testosterone filled passages describing bloody fights.

An author once confused with his writer father returns stirringly — and revealingly — to the story of his youth in the memoir 'Townie.'

In this interview, Andre Dubus III, whose sister-in-law is a librarian, talks about the significance of libraries in his career and their broader value to society.

Andre Dubus, fresh off the release of his nationally acclaimed new memoir, “Townie,” describes how growing up poor and street-tough in the Merrimack Valley helped shape him as a writer.

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Dubus speaks with that hard Boston lilt, that “whatchew gonna do bout it?!” vocal swagger popularized recently by The Fighter, and he really turns it on when he’s reading. His body, too, is animated by a fighter’s bravado. When he’s really hitting on a point, he affects a boxer’s physical nuances: a pulling back, a bracing, a short fast jab.

I had the pleasure of talking to Dubus while he was in L.A. on his book tour. He mentioned that book signings are his favorite part of touring, but “even despite that, I feel like crawling back to my room afterwards and pouring myself a double vodka.” More of his disarming honesty is below (and in the book, of course).

In Nonfiction, Andre Dubus’s memoir Townie moves up to #4, from #13, on the NYT Print Hardcover list after two weeks.

Townie tells how it was for a son who survived:

"I was a father now," he writes. "All day and all night of every week of every month of every year since becoming one. I'd felt surrounded by love, responsible to it; careful not to hurt it, and so grateful to get it. To punch another man in the face was to punch another father, was to punch some father's son."

"Townie" moves with the accelerating momentum of a thriller novel, plumbs the depths of a bittersweet love affair, and rends the reader's heart in two. This wrenching story can only strengthen the reputation of Andre Dubus III. From father to son, the torch has passed.

Before Andre Dubus III became a man who deftly wields words to make art, he was a scared and raging boy who wielded his fists to survive. He recounts that old life and his path away from violence in his stark and vivid new memoir.

Video

Fans of Dubus’s fiction will thrill to reading his muscular, occasionally lyrical prose rendering his own life. They will also like the passages late in the book that take the reader behind the curtain of the writer’s art as Dubus sees and practices it. Fans of Dubus père will bask in the fresh light cast here by the son, a light warmed by their loving kinship as adults. And everyone will be fascinated by this admirable, strange life and how, slowly and indirectly, it widens out to suggest truths about America, its men, and their peculiar need to “turn a wound into a wounding.”

This memoir is largely about his romance with violence — the initial flirtation, the heavy petting, the immersion and eventually the break-up. Dubus has unsettling insights into the allure of violence, and these insights eventually set him free as he realizes that "There were other ways to get this pus out, to express a wound."

After finishing the book, I was still not sure why Dubus stepped out from behind the art of fiction, but I was glad he did. He is such a solid writer, he redeems the genre. He shows that truth can be as honest as fiction.

Andre Dubus III on Townie. Video courtesy: Greater Boston/WGBH

Here in Massachusetts you can call someone a “townie” without really having to explain what that means — we all sort of just know.

But it’s not often you hear someone refer to himself that way. In his new memoir, local author Andre Dubus III not only calls himself “townie” — it’s the title of his book.

Dubus’s life unfolds in staccato vignettes, which cohere into an unaffected, if occasionally trite, portrait of an artist who triumphs in the face of adversity.

A New York Times editors' choice, "Townie," by "House of Sand and Fog" author Andre Dubus III has been written about everywhere. Trying to decide whether or not to dive in?

What stands out about Dubus's memoir, which reads like the kind of book a writer has been waiting his whole life to produce—one in which the sentences are unforced and exact, and the voice is placid with wisdom and generosity—is its violence. Townie offers some of the best writing in recent American literature on how common and unremarkable the crunching of noses, the slicing of stomachs, and the stomping of heads is to the experience of a vast number of young men.

Novelist Andre Dubus III recalls in intense detail his youthful battles on the streets of dying Massachusetts mill towns and the birth of his writing career.

I'll tell you, I do think that's one of the things the book's about: how pleasurable violence can be.

Dubus III, author of the critically acclaimed novel House of Sand and Fog, relates the story of his childhood and young adulthood with an immediate, raw intensity — it's at times difficult to read, but it's almost impossible to turn away. His prose is unaffected in the best way possible; there's never a hint of preciousness or pretentiousness. And his depictions of the northeastern Massachusetts of the '70s are stark and evocative; like his father, Dubus III is a master of setting.

It's a story about anger, but not an angry story, and it's full of compassion even for those who treated him the worst (and for those he treated badly himself).

"Townie" has all the rich texture, lucid characterization, compelling conflicts and narrative momentum of the best fiction. It renders heartbreaking, violent, tender and sometimes absurdly comic scenes without a trace of narcissism or sentimentality. From first sentence to last, Dubus employs a dispassionate yet urgent voice. It allows him to do justice to his past and to the people who populated it.

In the 1970s, life along Massachusetts' Merrimack River was harsh and unforgiving. Jobs were scarce, neighborhoods were rife with drugs and violence, and hopelessness and despair prevailed. To survive amid such hardship, "House of Sand and Fog" author Andre Dubus III, built himself up from a scared, scrawny victim to a muscled street fighter who could defend his family and channel his anger at his absent father. Later on, Dubus found redemption through writing. He healed old wounds and forged a new life as one of America's bestselling authors.

In his new memoir, Townie (W. W. Norton), Dubus discloses why he signed on as a boxer to protect himself and his three siblings and eventually turned to writing to save himself and his relationship with his father. In the excerpt below, Dubus recollects one Thanksgiving dinner where the broken family tried to put their differences and desolation aside.

Andre Dubus III passes that test with the highest marks in "Townie." It's a searing memoir; a punch in the gut, literally. The son of acclaimed short story writer Andre Dubus II and the author of "House of Sand and Fog" strips away all pretense and writes with blunt honesty about how he became a writer and the things he regrets along the way.

Abandoned by his father to a childhood of poverty, Andre Dubus III traces his path from street thug, to writer, and finally to a wrenching redemption

“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 (temper) 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.”

You have to buy Townie, by Andre Dubus III.

I don’t usually tell people what books to buy—although you’ve noticed that I quite often go around telling them what they have to read—but in this case I’m making an exception.

You have to buy this book because once you read it, you’re going to want people you know to read it, and the easiest, most efficient way to make that happen is to lend them your own copy—at least briefly.

Because once they start reading it, they’ll realize they need their own copy, give you yours back, and go buy one of their own.

If the common fear of the offspring of famous writers is that they will not be able to define themselves outside of that shadow, Dubus has set a high water mark in this work: He shows us that the son's shadow can also be long, and can change the shape of that which came before it.

His ability to describe violence might be unmatched among contemporary writers. He understands the arcane, unspoken vocabulary of how fights start, as well as the bone-crushing details of how they end. But "Townie" is most memorable for how vulnerable Dubus seems, once he has stripped himself down to the soul for his readers.

After dazzling critics and readers alike with the novels The Garden of Last Days and House of Sand and Fog, the last thing one might expect from author Andre Dubus III is a memoir about his adolescence and rise to maturity in New England. Dubus uses his talents to describe his initiation into the culture of violence in Massachusetts’ mill towns and his complex, challenging relationship with his father, the famed short-story writer Andre Dubus.

Andre Dubus III collected me at the Newburyport train station last month when the snow piles were already high. We stopped first for a coffee for the road; he asked all the questions: siblings, hometown, are you married?

Mr. Dubus's 1999 novel, "House of Sand and Fog," examined desperate lives on the fringes of San Francisco. Now Mr. Dubus chronicles the desperation of his own hardscrabble upbringing in the post-industrial mill towns of Massachusetts, where he brawled away his youth before he realized that a well-turned sentence offered more satisfaction than a cleanly landed right cross.

Since the book offers an insightful look at the male perspective on growing up (Dubus makes you understand why some boys are drawn to brawling and weight lifting), it would be a great choice for a male/female and father/son book clubs.

“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 — until it loses traction in clichés about redemption at its very end — 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.”

"Townie" recounts Dubus' sojourn in the kingdom of violence, and its counterpoint, the time he spent with his father, Andre Dubus II, an acclaimed author of austerely beautiful short stories about the anguish of working-class life.

"When I drive down Water Street and Merrimack Street, the weed lot that was Capt'n Chris (restaurant) is still there, and you still have the old Woolworth building," Dubus said. "In some ways, Haverhill has changed beautifully, but in some ways it's the same."

You could say the same about Dubus, who bares his soul in his latest book, "Townie," a memoir he had long debated writing.

“I haven’t punched anyone in 23 years — writing changed everything,” Dubus says. He’s surprised at how cathartic Townie was, how he confronted and made peace with the stages of his life. “[But] I’d never written about that cowardly, terrified boy, because he was unattractive to me in my twenties and thirties. At this age, I feel frankly fatherly toward that boy.”

Yeah, I'm about 200 pages into something new. You know what? It's this novel I've been trying to write for 25 years about this little chunk of my life that had to do with the '70s and poverty and sex, drugs, rock and roll, really, and I think I've come to the conclusion that I'm not one of these writers who can write fiction derivatally from my life and do it correctly. i can't have a bad Thanksgiving in Texas and then write a short story of a bad Thanksgiving in Texas. Truman Capote could. Hemingway had his Nick Adams' stories. A lot of writers can, but a lot of writers can't, and I think I'm in the camp that can't. So I think it's a creative non-fiction memoir. I think that's what I'm doing.

Andre Dubus reading an excerpt from his "accidental" memoir, Townie, at ALA Midwinter 2011 in San Diego.

“To call a piece of writing ‘visceral and yet elegant’ has become something of a literary cliché, but it’s hard to talk about this memoir without invoking the description. Despite his lyrical, earthy prose, Dubus pulls no punches and dulls no edges as he describes growing up in a drug-laden and brutally violent mill town in the mid-1970s—just a few hours away from his father, a respected author and professor whose friends included Kurt Vonnegut and John Updike.”—Sam, Village Books, Bellingham

The memoir boom would never have happened if so many aspiring writers hadn't grown up with such god-awful fathers — drunks and bullies, no-shows emotionally and literally. Andre Dubus III 's father was the darkly powerful short-story writer of the same name. Pop only skirts around the edges of his young son's life in Dubus' frank, moving memoir, Townie. But his absence is everywhere.

Writing is almost always accidental for me. I begin with one thing and it becomes something else. I went to work on an essay about baseball.

Essay by Andre Dubus III

List includes: Lights Out in Wonderland by DBC Pierre, Townie by Andre Dubus III, and Once Upon a River by Bonnie Jo Campbell.

We’ve been hearing advance buzz on this. If you’re going to MidWinter, be sure to stop by Norton’s booth for an advance readers edition.

And in Townie, Andre Dubus III portrays his father, Andre Dubus, Jr. (1936-1999), a virtuoso short story writer whose concentrated and penetrating books are no longer as well known as they should be. Perhaps today’s release of Dubus’ indelible books in ebook editions by Open Road Integrated Media will attract new readers.

I’m saying it’s one of the best books I’ve read this year. The book: Andre Dubus III’s Townie: A Memoir.

One September night in 2001, a Saudi visits a Florida club and pays a stripper to dance for him. She is a single mother who has brought her 3-year-old to work; while she dances, the child is briefly kidnapped by an unhappy patron. Dubus, who wrote “House of Sand and Fog,” based this novel partly on what is known about the Florida-based terrorist cell that hijacked a plane on 9/11.

With a keen eye for humanity’s follies and triumphs, Dubus explores the many dimensions of circumstance and choice in his novels. House of Sand and Fog, first a National Book Award Finalist and later a movie, brought him into the limelight; Garden of Last Days showcases his writing, introduces the reader to unforgettable characters, and is one of the best novels on the September 11 tragedy that I’ve read.

MY FIVE MOST ESSENTIAL BOOKS

Dubus draws on visits the Florida-based 9/11 terrorists made to a strip club days before the assaults in a novel that links three hard-luck characters. A terrorist pays $7,000 to spend private time with a stripper, a single mother whose 3-year-old is kidnapped the same night by a man trying to sort out his broken marriage. The story moves quickly, driven by the tensions of the child’s uncertain fate and the coming disaster.

The Garden of Last Days, Andre Dubus III
I've written about this before, so I won't belabor you with the details. Just know this: It's terrifying, unputdownable, and the best novel so far about 9/11.