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This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire

Fri, 04 Sep 2020 17:37:15 +0300

A searing memoir from critically acclaimed author Nick Flynn, on how childhood spills into parenthood.

When Nick Flynn was a child, his mother set fire to their home. With the spare lyricism and dark irony of his classic, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Flynn excavates the terrain of his traumatic upbringing and his mother's suicide. Now a parent himself, he discovers that he too may be burning his house down. He returns with his young daughter to the landscape of his youth, reflecting on how his "feral childhood" has him still in its reins.

This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire confronts Flynn's struggle and his failings—including a five- year affair, begun when his daughter was a toddler—with fierce candor. His marriage in crisis, Flynn seeks answers from his therapist, who tells him: "You have the ethics of a drowning man."

Alternating literary analysis and philosophy with intimate memoir and the bedtime stories he...

The Reenactments: A Memoir

Mon, 25 Nov 2013 12:48:33 +0200

A literary tour de force about the making of a film and representation from a master of the memoir form. For Nick Flynn, that game we all play—the who-would-play-you-in-the-movie-of-your-life game—has been resolved. The Reenactments chronicles the surreal experience of being on set during the making of the film Being Flynn, from his best-selling memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, and watching the central events of his life reenacted: his father's long run of homelessness and his mother's suicide. Flynn tells the story of Robert De Niro's first meeting with his real father in Boston and of watching Julianne Moore attempt to throw herself into the sea. The result is a mesmerizingly sharp-edged and kaleidoscopic literary tour de force as well as a compelling argument about consciousness, representation, and grief.

The Ticking Is the Bomb

Fri, 19 Nov 2010 13:58:26 +0200

"A beautiful, intelligent book that renders pain both ordinary and extraordinary into art."—Susanna Sonnenberg, San Francisco ChronicleIn 2007, during the months before Nick Flynn's daughter's birth, his growing outrage and obsession with torture, exacerbated by the Abu Ghraib photographs, led him to Istanbul to meet some of the Iraqi men depicted in those photos. Haunted by a history of addiction, a relationship with his unsteady father, and a longing to connect with his mother who committed suicide, Flynn artfully interweaves in this memoir passages from his childhood, his relationships with women, and his growing obsession—a questioning of terror, torture, and the political crimes we can neither see nor understand in post-9/11 American life. The time bomb of the title becomes an unlikely metaphor and vehicle for exploring the fears and joys of becoming a father. Here is a memoir of profound self-discovery—of being lost and found, of painful family...

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

Thu, 25 Nov 2004 12:48:33 +0200

"Sometimes I'd see my father, walking past my building on his way to another nowhere. I could have given him a key, offered a piece of my floor. But if I let him inside the line between us would blur, my own slow-motion car wreck would speed up." Nick Flynn met his father for the third time when he was twenty-seven years old, working as a caseworker in a homeless shelter in Boston. As a teenager he'd received letters from this stranger, a self-proclaimed poet and con man doing time in federal prison for bank robbery. Nick, his own life precariously unsettled, was living alternately in a ramshackle boat and in a warehouse that was once a strip joint. In bold, dazzling prose, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (a phrase Flynn senior uses to describe his life on the streets) tells the story of two lives and the trajectory that led Nick and his father into that homeless shelter, onto those streets, and finally to each other.