I spent two hours in a pick-up truck with Andre Dubus III yesterday. We drove around the mill towns along the Merrimack River. Newburyport, Haverhill, Bradford. He showed me places where he grew up, alleys where he fought with people, the bars and gas stations and bridges that figure in his memoir, Townie, coming out in February. He showed me where his dad had lived. He pointed out his father’s grave, underneath an evergreen bough weighed with snow, the place where he, his brother, and a pal dug the hole and placed their dad in the earth in the coffin they had built.

He showed me his home now. He and his brother built that, too, with the money Dubus made from House of Sand and Fog and Garden of Last Days. He lives there with his wife and their three teenage kids; his mother-in-law lives in an apartment on the ground floor.

It was dusk and he said, “Wait, wait, before we go in, come here, you’ve got to see this.” And we tromped through some snow and he grabbed my shoulder and said, “Just take a look.” And we looked up at this great house. A porch wrapped all the way around, a large round window mooned down above the driveway. “It took three years,” he said. He sounded proud.

And rightly so. We raced around inside, room to room, huge kitchen, giant hearth. He pointed out his tile work, big blue ones in one bathroom. “All mine,” he said. We both like tiling. He showed me his 15 year-old daughter’s lofted bed, the second story deck, the space where he writes  down in the basement, and then up a set of ladder-stairs, “Careful,” he warned as we were climbing, “they’re not to code.” Into a locker of  a room, not wide enough for two people to stand side-by-side, a small desk at one end with a computer and some papers, a small window at the other with a grey fleece blanket tacked over it as curtain. No light gets in, and no sound either.

Which is useful in a house that you can tell serves as a gathering place, for the teenagers and their pals, for his wife’s dance troupe, for family and for friends. Open the door into the kitchen, and warmth is what you feel. What I’ve started noticing is how rare it is, and how special when it happens, to walk into a place and feel immediately comfortable, to feel welcome. This home had that. A quality that goes beyond skylights and beams and a big fireplace.

As he drove me to the train, dark now, he told me that he still wasn’t all the way comfortable with the abundance. “If you’re a fish,” he said, “it’s hard to know how to fly.” I’d seen where he’d grown up. Tough and poor. The town next door was worlds away. But to be able to create your own home this way, to design it and build it with your brother, to use money made from writing, I can’t rightly speak to how amazing that is. Dream-come-true doesn’t do it justice. Disbelief and gratitude came through in everything he said. And pride, deeply felt. To make a book with your brain and heart, and then make a house with your brain and hands and heart, what could make someone prouder? A family maybe.