The push and pull of memoirs.
27 March 2011
I'm having a complex relationship with Andre Dubus III's new memoir Townie.
I'm halfway through it, somewhat by accident. Originally I only checked it out from the library because it's been getting a lot of word-of-mouth and big reviews, and I like to try and keep up with nonfiction trends, even if I'm not particularly interested in the books in question.* Dubus, the son of short story author Andre Dubus, tells a coming-of-age tale about his mother's struggle to support he and his three siblings after his father left them, and how they had to live on the poor side of the Massachusetts towns where his father taught college courses.
Growing up in poverty, of course, meant that Dubus also grew up around a lot of violence, from neighborhood bullies to scary neighbors ("Across the street lived the Whelans. There were always three or four cars and trucks in their side yard, some on blocks, the hoods open or gone, and the father, Larry, worked on the engines every afternoon. He was short and had no front teeth and he drank from cans of Pabst he'd rest on the chassis. I don't remember how many kids lived there, but a few years later his oldest son would go to prison for raping his twenty-seven-month old niece." p. 30.), as well as drug dealers and junkies. Eventually Dubus became a weight-lifter and learned how to box, hoping to hold his own in fights (if not start them himself rather than waiting for them to find him).
The complicated part is that I keep putting the book down, meaning to take it back to the library, because I'm really not enjoying it. But then...I keep picking it back up. Without really even meaning to. And pretty soon I'm another 20 or 30 pages in. This leads me to think it must be well-written, and I think it is. It's too visceral for me, but Dubus does keep pulling you through the narrative. And I'm curious to know if we ever find out what happens to his mother, or his siblings. But we'll see if I make it all the way through.
*I've never been all that interested in reading Dubus's novels; I saw the movie adaptation of House of Sand and Fog a few years back and thought it was the most god-awful, depressing, melodramatic, based-on-a-totally-typical-Oprah-book film ever, so I definitely didn't want to read the book. But now that I've read part of his memoir I can see where he'd have plenty of depressing personal experiences to plumb for material.