Did they send the right guy?
Andre Dubus III writes serious, literary, heavy—often very heavy—stuff.
At his book signing, I watch as the jovial, immensely likable author high-fives a reader’s kid.
Andre Dubus III grew up bullied, and learned to knock people’s teeth out with a single punch. What many readers know of the House of Sand and Fog author’s life comes from his latest book, a memoir about his rough childhood around Boston following the departure of his famous writer father.
He chats up a priest, and then warmly demands that a reader give him a hug.
Andre Dubus III entered his teen years on a wave of booze, marijuana and vandalism. Later, he got by cleaning offices, worked as a carpenter, bartended, even did a stint as a bounty hunter.
At the start of our interview, he smiles and raises his pint of Guinness. “Here, brother,” he says.
“Cheers,” I say.
“To words!” he beams in his Boston accent.
He sips.
“Aw, that’s good, innit? And do you know it’s loaded with bioflavonoids, which are a natural cholesterol lowerer?”
Wait a second. Andre Dubus III: Who are you?
ANDRE DUBUS III DIDN’T HAVE ANY LITERARY ASPIRATIONS.
Sitting at a high-top table in a tavern, the 52-year-old even looks the part of a successful writer—sport coat, sharp collared shirt, gray-twinged, windswept hair. (A Boston Globe reporter described him as a literary cross between Kurt Russell and John Mellencamp.) But though many are quick to assume that the son of critically adored short-story writer Andre Dubus (and cousin of Pulitzer Prize–nominee James Lee Burke) followed a predetermined path, the truth is Dubus had no big publishing dreams.
“I never wanted to be a writer,” he says. “I am just still stunned that I’ve sold millions of books and make my living doing this.”
The younger Dubus was always more preoccupied with protecting himself and his family while his mother—finding herself divorced from an unfaithful and absent husband—struggled to pay the bills and raise Dubus and his three siblings. A small-statured kid, Dubus was the target of bullies in his Boston neighborhood (he also took a few hits for sprinkling his speech with too many adverbs), and eventually he reacted by turning to obsessively bodybuilding and boxing.
Still, he always loved language, and secretly relished writing assignments at school—though he’d never have admitted it on the street. And at 22, having been on a violent path likely to land him in jail or dead, Dubus experienced a catharsis. He was on his way to go box, and had a strange urge to sit down and write instead. So he did.
He felt alive. Awake. Like steam had been released from a valve.
“It was a semi-spiritual, life-saving moment where I found something that just made me feel like me, and that was not destructive,” he says. “I don’t want to paint the picture that I was some badass who discovered creativity—it was more it was always in me. I was always a sensitive, sweet kid, but I got brutalized and I became brutal. And frankly, I don’t think it was my natural makeup. I don’t think its anyone’s natural makeup to be a violent brawler.”
Now, at the tavern, the man who never wanted to be a writer (but who would become a finalist for the National Book Award and win a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Magazine Award, Pushcart Prize and an American Academy of Arts and Letters 2012 Literature Award) sips his beer and does what he does numerous times over when discussing his craft—he reaches into his encyclopedic vat of writing quotes and selects the perfect one.
“I like what Janet Burroway says,” he says. “ ‘Writing isn’t hard; not writing is hard.’ That’s only true if you’re a writer.”
ANDRE DUBUS III IS NO LONGER HAUNTED BY HIS FATHER’S LONG SHADOW.
Does your father help you? Does he help you get published?
When he was starting out, this is what Dubus heard time and
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