Townie : : a Memoir

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	921 Dubus, Andre	4-week checkout	Due 05-24-2024
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	921 Dubus, Andre	4-week checkout	Due 05-10-2024

After their parents divorce in the 1970's, Andre Dubus III and his three siblings grew up with their exhausted working mother in a depressed Massachusetts mill town saturated with drugs and crime. To protect himself and those he loved from street violence, Andre learned to use his fists so well that he was even scared of himself. He was on a fast track to getting killed, or killing someone else, or to beatings-for-pay as a boxer. Nearby, his father, an eminent author, taught on a college campus and took the kids out on Sundays. The clash of worlds couldn't have been more stark or more difficult for a son to communicate to a father. Only by becoming a writer himself could Andre begin to bridge the abyss and save himself.

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The Welcoming Meditation on Violence and Coming to Terms with Ambiguity submitted by sVfGI7Glt2pz7GZgVB90 on July 10, 2020, 7:20am
What struck me is the recollection of how the author comes to terms with his ambivalent rapport with his celebrity father and how he grew up inaccessible from an educated society when his father left the family to fend for himself.

As a 1970s teen, Dubus lived in a depressed town, a setting where violent behavior was the unthinking response to poverty. Bullies intimidated him until he started lifting weights.

This courageous memoir is an expose into the depths of so many emotions. It recalls how the author was on the verge of becoming a bully himself until he was liberated by the power of the written word. h

PLEASING, GRAPHIC, APPALLING, STIRRING.