The divorce of his parents affect Andre Dubus III and his three siblings greatly. With the father away an having to live with little money in poor and violent neighborhoods of Boston, the family goes through very tough times.

Andre is meek and easily pushed around, and he feels guilty for his inability to protect his brother and sisters from the rough and cruel people around them. So he starts to learn boxing, and eventually grasps quite a few life lessons before starting to write.

Toward the end of the memoir, he reconnects with his father, the great short-story writer Andre Dubus II, again, and his family is better able to cope with life around them.

everything: the life story, the way it was told, the sharp insight into the truth of people and events, author's courage to tell things as they were, his weaving a complex life story inside a perfectly understandable frame, his diction, his use of the language, his storytelling, etc.

buy the author's father's book to try to see into him with other eyes than those of his son's, and I did. I am in the process of reading it.

all kinds of emotions.

Andre Dubus III, born in 1059, is a writer of novels and short stories.
His books are: The Cage Keeper and Other Stories, Bluesman, House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days, and Townie.

This memoir blew my mind. I carried it inside me for days after I finished it. I can't find enough words to praise it properly.

This is a memoir, and each time I read a memoir, I feel like a peeping Tom. This book was no exception: yet, it is so well written that it shook my insides.

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Created Aug 10, 2011 at 2:48pm • Submit your own review...