I bought Andre Dubus III's "Townie" for my Kindle

(and why does that phrase always morph itself into "mein kindle" in my head?) and have been reading it diligently. Perhaps more diligently that some other things I've read so far on "my book." My initial attraction to the DubusIII memoir was a geographical & temporal connection: I lived in the places he lived & memoirizes about around roughly the same time he's talking about. I was a bit older so probably one of the stuffy adults who surrounded his adolescence, and he was one of the damn teenagers getting underfoot of my young adulthood. But the geographical connection is startling; my stomping grounds in Haverhill and Newburyport, at about the same times, were literally around the corner from the places he lived and acted out. Yet the culture he was in was contiguous to but not touching the one I lived in, even though, at many times, we were literally within arm's length of each other.

I'm undecided about the quality of the writing; for one thing there's a lot of repetition, of sense if not of precise examples and phrases. For another, there are many, many examples of very awkward phrasing and infelicitous imagery. So I'm dubious about DubusIII's basic literary talents and will have to read some fiction to get a better sense of it, but in this piece he is most certainly not a stylist, and even more certainly in need of a good editor.