Essay On Townie By Andre Dubus III

Andre Dubus III’s memoir titled, “Townie” reflects on Dubus’s life beginning before he was born and ending at age 40. At a young age his father left his mother for a college student and from then on his mother struggled to provide for him and his three siblings. Even though his father sent child support payments monthly, his mother had difficulty fully providing for her children. However, despite her efforts, Dubus and his siblings were able to get away with a lot simply because their mother was working long hours in order to provide a place to live and food on the table. His oldest sister, Suzanne, sold and did drugs while Dubus and his younger brother, Jeb, drank, stole, and did drugs. On top of that, growing up in rough neighborhoods and

He began going to Connolly’s boxing gym with intensions of lifting weights and bulking up, but he ended up learning how to box. The boxing training made him a little more confident because he knew how to fight, this resulted in him becoming involved in many brawls throughout the years and him liking the idea that he could hurt the bullies – this became addicting to him. As he grew older, he began to know his father a little better, but the two only really knew one another as friends and drinking buddies rather than father and son. Towards the end of his father’s life, the two became much closer, seeing one another often. Dubus also helped his father a lot after the accident that confined his father to a wheelchair in the last years of his life. This assistance allowed Andre to help his dad push forward and continue

Not really enough time to develop strong relationships. Despite this, Dubus learned quite a bit from his father. As Dubus and his father reconnected in his young adulthood, Andre was always the one to fight while his father took a different approach and talked to people. After Dubus married his wife, Fontaine, in his late 20s, he began to show characteristics of his father when approaching a situation he would normally begin a fight. The most significant situation depicted in “Townie” was when he and Fontaine were on a train from Ireland to England. The couple was in the second to last train car filled with young school girls from Germany – between the ages of 12 and 13- and an elderly couple. All but Dubus and the elderly man were asleep when sketchy men continued to come into the train car and startle the young girls awake while on their way to the last train car. Dubus got fed up with this and confronted the men. However, unlike any other confrontation he had in the past several years, Dubus spoke to the men. He did not fight, he talked it out, asking the men what they would do if they were in his situation. Each one of the men said they would protect the girls, this diffused the situation and the girls were able to sleep a majority of the night undisturbed by the sketchy men. Several years prior to that event, when Jeb