A Conversation with Andre Dubus III

Photo © David Le

Andre Dubus III grew up in mill towns on the Merrimack River along the Massachusetts–New Hampshire border. He is the author of six books, including three New York Times best sellers. House of Sand and Fog was a number one New York Times best seller, a fiction finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Book Sense Book of the Year, and was an Oprah's Book Club Selection; it was adapted into an Academy Award–nominated motion picture starring Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly. The Garden of Last Days is soon to be a major motion picture. His memoir, Townie, was a New York Times best seller and a New York Times Editors' Choice. Dirty Love was chosen as a Notable Book and Editors' Choice by the New York Times, a Notable Fiction by the Washington Post, and a Kirkus starred Best Book of 2013. Andre Dubus III has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for Fiction, two Pushcart Prizes, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. His books have been published in over twenty-five languages.

JACQUELINE KOLOSOV:

Let's start with your own beginnings as a writer, including the fact that Andre Dubus II is your father. In your essay "Carver and Dubus, New York City, 1988," your father, recently confined to a wheelchair following an automobile accident, meets his hero, Raymond Carver, at the annual ceremony of the Academy of Arts and Letters the year Carver, dying from brain cancer, is to be inducted. The essay delves into your evolving identity as a writer and the fact that writing got you off a track of violence and self-destruction. The therapeutic and transformative benefits of art are becoming increasingly well known. Using this essay as a touchstone, would you speak to this subject in your own life and to the ways in which your status as Andre Dubus II's son helped or hindered you?

ANDRE DUBUS:

I wrote a lot about this in Townie, my accidental memoir. I say "accidental" because I didn't set out to write a memoir but a series of essays. Along the way, I took on the subject of my sons playing baseball. I asked myself, why didn't I play baseball, and I realized it was because I was living in first-world poverty with a single mom and my three siblings and moving a lot and getting beat up a lot. There were a lot of drugs and alcohol, and it was the early 1970s; Vietnam was drawing to a close, and all the dads were leaving the homes. Several times I tried to write about this as a novel, but nothing came but failed manuscripts. So I finally delivered my novel The Garden of Last Days in 2007, and I began to write this essay about my sons playing baseball. Five hundred pages later, I wrote about the reasons why I wasn't playing baseball in what became Townie. So I have to talk about childhood first in order to answer your questions about writing.

KOLOSOV:

Fair enough.

DUBUS:

Mine was a violent youth, and there were no men around, and when I think back on my childhood, the predominant emotion is fear and also self-hatred. I'm sure there was some joy, but it's interesting: either Tobias Wolff or Tim O'Brien said that memory has its own story to tell, and my memory is full of fear and self-hatred. My parents eloped from South Louisiana. My mother was eighteen or nineteen, and her father said, "If this doesn't work out, you're not coming home because there are no divorces in this family." Four kids later, and nine years later, it didn't work out, and the last thing she was going to do was go home. I watched my mom get dumped by all my father's friends. She was twenty-seven, and she had no real education...