I don't recommend it, but that's how I got the idea.“I have to say my experience when I walked out of the movie having seen it, I felt like I had been sort of shaken and I came out and thought I just want to go home and see my family. ![]() I had to do that over and over, before I found a pattern that seemed true to those characters and to me. And then when one arm turned out too long or the bodice was on backwards, I had to do it again. So I had to cut up that fabric, rearrange the pieces and sew them back together. I had to think what they might do, and how that might involve the others, and how what they'd done in the beginning would make them behave at the end. And although these imagined people and their surroundings and accoutrements alone were satisfying to me as a habitual daydreamer, I recognized that this was no way to run a novel. Other scraps of my childhood helped me envision scenes from their lives-the creak of the ice expanding, the sting of raw wind, the smell of manure all around the schoolyard, the slipperiness of my little sister as she clung to me when she was learning to swim, my fear of my first grade teacher, my brother's black tooth, the tedious slowness of our old four horsepower motor-as did snippets I'd heard from my great aunts and grandparents and parents about card clubs, business college, and nursing school, the time my great grandfather put geese in the car, the parade in which my other great grandfather had been marching when he met my great grandmother, the dances at the lakeside pavilion and the bands you could hear all around the lake.įinally, I had a whole world, like a great, gorgeous bolt of fabric, but still I didn't have a story, not one focused sequence of events that engaged these characters from the beginning of the book to the end. Once I had the characters-Imogene came along very early, as did Carl, although he was quite different at first, and Clement and Theresa Owens weren't far behind-they seemed so rich and interesting that I knew there had to be a story associated with them. She was a pinch of starter dough, but was so subsumed by the new loaf that I could start an entirely different novel with her today. There's really no one like her in Drowning Ruth. But as I delved into her past-or rather made up things about her past-Amanda and Ruth emerged, and in their vividness, they pushed that woman aside. For years, the opening scene of my novel, which I was then calling The Recluse, was an old woman watching from her window and reaching for her bb gun, as a little boy crept toward her house on a dare. Later, when I hoped, like my friend, that I might be able to write something, if only I could think of something to write about, I realized that the idea of this woman and the atmosphere I'd attached to her had stuck with me. He lives in Newburyport, Massachusetts, with his wife, dancer/choreographer Fontaine Dollas, and their three children. He teaches in Emerson College's MFA in Writing program, and at Tufts University. ![]() He was one of three finalists for the 1994 Prix de Rome given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and House of Sand and Fog was a finalist for the 1999 National Book Award for Fiction.Īndre Dubus III is the son of Andre Dubus, a widely recognized master of short fiction who died in February 1999. It has also been cited in The One Hundred Most Distinguished Stories of 1993 and The Best American Short Stories of 1994. His characters were inspired by two people whose predicaments had stuck in his mind for years: a woman he read abut in the newspaper who was wrongfully evicted from her house and forced to live in her car, and a college friend's father, who had been a colonel in the Iranian air force and could only find menial jobs after fleeing to the United States.ĭubus' work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and the 1985 National Magazine Award for Fiction. Much of that book was written in his car, which he often parked at a local cemetery in search of quiet and solitude. For the next few years, he taught and did odd jobs as a carpenter while working on House of Sand and Fog. His first book, The Cage Keeper and Other Stories, was published in 1989, followed by 1993 by his first novel, Bluesman. Before finding his calling as a writer, Andre Dubus III worked for brief stints as a bounty hunter, private investigator, carpenter, bartender, actor, and teacher.
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