We often want to know more about our favorite authors. After investing hundreds of pages of time in their created worlds, we feel entitled to know more about what they’re like in our shared world. It’s the root of our fascination with Hemingway’s boxing and Faulkner’s drinking, with Greene’s Catholicism and Salinger’s reclusiveness. We want to know more, but rarely do we get our wish. However, you would be hard-pressed to find someone who shares more than Andre Dubus 3rd.

In his memoir, Townie, Mr. Dubus opens musty doors and lets the sun in on his festering past. Everything is fair game. His younger sister’s scoliosis, his younger brother’s suicide attempts, his older sister’s rape, his father’s constant affairs with his students — everything is laid bare. Perhaps nothing is more painful than Mr. Dubus’s own weakness in the face of constant violence against himself and his family, whose protector he is determined to become.

Through the book, Mr. Dubus takes us on his journey from childhood through adolescence to adulthood. In a sort of prologue, we begin with the 16-year-old Mr. Dubus preparing to go for a run, only the second of his life, with the father who barely knows him. Wearing his sister’s much-too-small sneakers, Mr. Dubus runs 11 miles until he can run no more. “I couldn’t remember ever feeling so good. About life. About me. About what else might lie ahead if you were just willing to take some pain, some punishment,” he writes.

Mr. Dubus takes more than his share of pain and punishment, though, and much of the memoir is taken up with his difficult relationship with his father, the short story writer Andre Dubus. The first half of the book is infused with the sentiment that if the elder Mr. Dubus hadn’t left, his family’s life would have been different. Writing of life before his parents divorced, the author recalls: “My memory of that time is the memory of parties, though we were so broke we ate canned meat and big blocks of government cheese.” With his father there, poverty wasn’t so crushing.

Violence is a recurring theme in Mr. Dubus’s life. From school fights to neighborhood bullies to bar fights to one particularly shocking episode in a diner, Mr. Dubus is surrounded by fists:

“Sometimes I’d get shoved and kicked and pushed to the ground. I was still trying to figure out what I’d done to make them mad, I had not yet learned that cruelty was cruelty and you don’t ask why, just hit first and hit hard.”

It takes him many years to hit back. His and his brother’s new bikes, a gift from their mother’s new boyfriend, get stolen, his brother gets beaten to a pulp in his own front yard, his sister gets raped in a car in Boston, some kid throws a Molotov cocktail into his mother’s car — and each time Mr. Dubus is powerless, arms at his side, wishing he could hit back. “There was the nonfeeling that I had no body, that I had no name, no past and no future, that I simply was not. I was not here,” Mr. Dubus writes after watching his brother get beaten up in the front yard.

In high school, he has become something of a vagrant, skipping school, stealing, going to drug-fueled parties, but he also starts lifting weights and then boxing. He leaves his old friends behind and befriends a young man, Sam Dolan, who becomes his best friend. They lift weights together, go for runs and box. They go out for drinks, chase girls and get in fights with all who threaten them. “For the first time, they [teachers] seemed to know I was there. And that’s how I felt, too. Like I was here. Like I was somehow more on the planet with everybody else,” Mr. Dubus writes of the change he notices after he starts working out and doing his schoolwork.

Mr. Dubus has his first fight in a bar called Ronnie D’s near his home in Haverhill, with a man named Steve Lynch. The fight sends Mr. Lynch to the hospital; Mr. Lynch’s friends come out of the bar to seek revenge by boxing Mr. Dubus around the ears. He writes, “That was it? My entire boyhood I’d been unable to talk or move or resist out of fear of that? My head and ears were sore, so what.”

With this newfound realization, Mr. Dubus gets into more and more fights and it seems that he has acquired the taste for blood. Mr. Dubus becomes aware of this, too, but can’t stop himself. An uncomfortable realization comes over the reader when it becomes clear that Mr. Dubus is looking for fights, as if making up for all the ones he let go by. He punches guys for looking at Mr. Dolan’s girlfriend the wrong way, for saying coarse things to women Mr. Dubus doesn’t even know. He is no longer content to be the protector of his family, he must defend against every injustice he sees. Mr. Dubus continues boxing on and off, but one gets the sense that it’s the street fights, whether in his small Massachusetts town or in Austin, Texas, where he goes away for school, that Mr. Dubus lives for.

This fascination with violence comes to a head one night in a diner. Mr. Dolan and his girlfriend had been attacked by some street toughs who had disguised their car as an unmarked police cruiser. One of them knifed Mr. Dolan before getting away. Mr. Dubus, Mr. Dolan and a friend who worked as a security guard at the college where Mr. Dubus’s father taught, went out for revenge. After cruising around town looking for Mr. Dolan’s attackers, they found them in a diner. The toughs turn out to be young, younger than Mr. Dubus and his friends, but that doesn’t stop him. He beats one so violently, that his girlfriend urges him to stop before he kills the boy. All of this in front of a diner full of patrons. “I had never hit a baseball with a bat in a game people I loved were watching; I didn’t know what it felt like to slap a puck into a net or catch a football and run with it into a place called the end zone, but standing in the dawn’s early light with Vinny it occurred to me this is what those acts must feel like: earned and glorious and edged with blood.”

Boxing no longer feels the same after this night in which Mr. Dubus is completely unleashed; eventually he learns to stop fighting.

As Mr. Dubus gets older, his relationship with his father changes. His father never really becomes his father, but they do move from being strangers to being something more than friends. Mr. Dubus never really shared with his father, the way he shares with his readers, how painful his childhood was, but his feelings of anger and abandonment melt into love and admiration. When the son eschews nights of fighting for nights of writing, his father becomes supportive and they find common ground.

When the elder Mr. Dubus is struck by a car on the highway at the age of 50, he is left without the use of his legs. Mr. Dubus helps his father to build up his upper body to what it had been before the accident. “I had never grown anything before, never planted a seed and watered it till something blossomed that had been waiting there all along. At least I thought I hadn’t. But I had. It was me I had built up. And I imagined that helping Pop get his strength back gave the kind of sustained creative satisfaction a gardener must feel, or a coach, or a father.”

The story is hardly flattering in many instances, as Mr. Dubus portrays himself as irritating, an undergraduate filled with disgust for the bourgeois, or terrifying, a young man filled with bloodlust. Yet the story is ultimately about the ways he found to overcome each challenge.

With the death of the elder Mr. Dubus comes the book’s conclusion. Writing of building his father’s coffin with his younger brother, the author conveys the love these sons show for the father who was never truly a father. “Pop had eaten life, and his death had left a cavernous, gnawing hole in the air we moved through.”

The young man weighed down with poverty and suffering, punching and being punched, is a married father now who has made peace with his past.