Two celebrated authors discuss the power of writing fiction and real life. Excerpted from “Andre Dubus in Conversation with Tobias Wolff,” March 16, 2011.

ANDRE DUBUS III, Author, House of Sand and Fog and Townie

In conversation with TOBIAS WOLFF, Author; Professor, Stanford University

WOLFF: This was a book of necessity, not of whimsy, or to pass the time, or to fulfill a contract. I’m curious how it began to announce itself to you.

DUBUS: I haven’t really read that many memoirs. I’ve read three, [Wolff’s] two and A Moveable Feast. I’m not just saying this because Tobias Wolff is sitting right next to me, but the truth is I didn’t know a memoir could be as powerful or as interesting as fiction until I read This Boy’s Life. For 25 years I have been trying to write this stuff as fiction. I have probably spent seven years trying to write Townie as a novel. My first efforts were horrible. I was still angry at my parents and my lousy little childhood. Then I tried again between two other books I was writing, and it fell apart again. Then I tried again after House of Sand and Fog as fiction.

I was trying to capture [this]: I’m 10 years younger than the Vietnam generation, and I’m 10 years older than Generation X. But I had hair down to my waist, I was popping acid, smoking dope, drinking whiskey at 13, and having precocious sex. We were walking and talking like we were counterculture people when really we were just punks getting high. I’m living with my single mom in a mill town, Vietnam is ending, Watergate is going on. People have nostalgia for the ’70s, but I always remember it as a bleak and horrible decade. I finally came to the conclusion that I’m not the kind of writer that can write fiction that comes from my life. Truman Capote could have a bad cocktail party in Manhattan and write a story about a bad cocktail party in Manhattan. For me it would have to be about really good barbecue in Texas from the point of view of the guy that wants to kill all the white people at the barbecue. I couldn’t be in it.

WOLFF: It was a hard upbringing. You had to, eventually, decide you were going to turn your body into an instrument of survival. You [undertook] a regime of exercise and weightlifting. You became a boxer; you fought for money. You not only survived but dominated in the world that you grew up in. At what point [did] you decide to make your mind the instrument of your survival?

DUBUS: I noticed violence tends to escalate. The more you do it, the worse it gets. I came close to kicking a guy to death. If it wasn’t for my girlfriend, two more kicks and you would be interviewing me from prison.

I just knew that I was creating more violence in the world and in my life. I was training for the Golden Gloves down in Lowell. One night I was getting ready to work out when, instead of running to the gym to work out, I brewed some tea and I began to write a scene. I was writing from the point of view of a young woman losing her virginity on the hood of a Trans-Am in the Maine woods in a soft rain. It was so awful. Flaubert said, “A bad book comes just as sincerely from a man’s soul as a good one.” I felt like a valve had released steam from inside me. In a few months I began to write my first story, which again was very awful but sincere.

There is that great line from Hemingway: The job of a writer is not to judge but to seek to understand. I was trying to feel other people; I was trying to step inside their own private skin. I’m not saying writing makes people better, because some of the biggest jerks I’ve met are writers, including myself. But writing was putting me in a much more empathic state.