What do you believe your life will be like? This is the big question everyone is always asking, but more importantly, how will you get there? The journey of life is about growth and change. You are solely responsible for bettering yourself, no matter what is thrown at you in the process. Andre Dubus wrote his memoir, Townie, about his life journey. As readers, we get to visualize the hardships, joys, heartbreak, and change he goes through as an adolescent to a young adult. While I was reading, I couldn’t help but find many parallels between myself and Andre. Some of the major similarities between us are friendship dynamics, growth of our characters, and constant change within our lives; however, we differ in the specific circumstances we were …show more content…
Andre realized he had to grow up when his father left. He was only about ten years old when he gave himself the responsibility to be ‘the man of the house’. The day his father left, everyone was upset, but him. All Andre could think at that moment was, “Mom would need to be comforted now. Niccole. There was food to think about. How to get it without a car. I tried to keep standing as straight as I could.” (24) I can relate because I have older parents. As they grew older, I needed to learn how to take care of them on my own. Like Andre, this sudden responsibility was a shock to me, but it finally hit me when I realized my parents were much older than everyone else's. There has always been this pressure I have put on myself to live up to the standard they set for me. I wanted to be as great of a caretaker to them as they were to me. Later in Andre’s adulthood, he and his sister Niccole visited their mother in Florida. He took them on vacation to Key West and “was finally taking care of my family the way I’d felt called to from the beginning, since I was a boy” (327). I remember the first time I was finally able to feel like I could take care of my parents. I bought them tickets to a Billy Joel and Stevie Nicks concert they have been wanting to go to. It was such a great feeling to repay them, even in a small way, for the amazing childhood they gave me. Both Andre and I are under self-assigned responsibility to be mature and take care of the people we love at such a young age. I was lucky to have such great parents, Andre however, had no example to follow and only when he was older did he feel like he accomplished his long awaited
When Andre was only a six or seven years old kids, their parents got divorced. He and his three siblings grew up with their mother near Massachusetts mill town after their father had left them for another woman. They lived in a place where crime and drugs was