Andre Dubus III

Harvard Book Store is very pleased to welcome acclaimed local novelist ANDRE DUBUS III as he discusses his first memoir, Townie, in conversation with another favorite New England writer, RICHARD RUSSO.

After their parents divorced in the 1970s, 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. He signed on as a boxer.

Nearby, his father, the eminent Louisiana-born author Andre Dubus II, 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.

"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.... His compassionate memoir abounds with exquisitely rendered scenes of fighting, cheating, drugging, drinking, and loving. A striking, eloquent account of growing up poor and of the making of a writer." —Kirkus Reviews