Though not without twinges of remorse and self-doubt. A self-appointed avenger of female honor, Dubus comes out swinging and generally hospitalizes his opponents. Over the next hundred pages he throws plenty. I wanted to set my feet and throw one into the big one’s face.”

I wanted to run back up there and try again. “My entire boyhood I’d been unable to talk or move or resist out of fear of that? My head and ears were sore, so what. “That was it?” he muses, stunned but proud. When a bully in a bar insults his kid brother, Dubus clocks the guy and then gets tackled and roughed up. With fanatical resolve, the kid embarks on a Rocky-like program of weight-training and boxing and bulking up - “methodically teaching myself how to hurt people” - until he feels ready to put his new muscles and nerve to the test. I looked into his eyes: I don’t care if you get your face beat in, I don’t care if you get kicked in the head or stabbed or even shot, I will never allow you not to fight back ever again. Retreating to the bathroom, he faces himself in the mirror, hates what he sees and vows to change it: “this kid with narrow shoulders and soft arm and chest muscles and no balls. He has just stood by helplessly while a hulking 20-year-old army-trained monster bloodied his brother’s face and called his mother a whore. One April afternoon Dubus III, on the cusp of adolescence, decides he’s had enough. His father, the much-loved short story writer Andre Dubus II, walked out on a young wife and family to pursue his craft and girlfriends, and from then on the four kids were basically on their own with the thugs, drug dealers and budding sadists that infested Newburyport and Haverhill.

If you’ve ever been harassed or hurt by a bully, if you’ve ever dreamed of revenge, if you’ve ever crossed the line from dreaming to hitting back and felt a rush of relief and joy as you punished your enemy, then you’re going to find a lot that resonates and a lot that disturbs the hell out of you in Andre Dubus III’s new memoir.īest known for his 1999 novel, “ House of Sand and Fog,” Dubus grew up weak and small and poor and cowering in the rough mill towns north of Boston.

Townie by andre dubus