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Won Book of the Year Adult Non-Fiction2012 Indie Choice Awards Amazon Best Book of the Month February 2011 An acclaimed novelist reflects on his violent past and a lifestyle that threatened to destroy himuntil he was saved by writing. After their parents divorced in the 1970s, Andre Dubus III and his three siblings grew up with their exhausted working mother in a depressed Massachusetts mill town saturated with drugs and everyday violence. To protect himself and those he loved, Andre started pumping iron and learned to use his fists so well that he became the kind of man who could send others to the hospital with one punch, and did. Irresistibly drawn to stand up for the underdog, he was on a fast track to getting killedor killing someone else. Nearby, his father, an eminent author, taught on a college campus and took the kids out on Sundays.