Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir Author: Visit Amazon's Nick Flynn Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0393329402 | Format: EPUB
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir Description
From Publishers Weekly
Flynn's wayward father, a self-styled writer and ex-con, describes his life on Boston's streets as "another bullshit night in Suck City": he hangs out in ATM lobbies, stuffs his coat with newspaper and is often "still drunk from the night before." This biting memoir describes the years poet Flynn (
Some Ether;
Blind Huber) spent, in his late 20s, working at one of the city's homeless shelters, where his path crisscrossed with his down-and-out father's. In examining their troublesome relationship, Flynn admits to feeling lost, as he turned to alcohol and came close to being on the other side of the shelter admissions booth himself. Punchy language and short chapters make what could otherwise be excessively painful more palatable (e.g., "Fact: In 1839 Dostoyevsky witnessed a mob of peasants attacking his father.... they poured vodka down his throat until he died. Fact: I can watch my father pouring vodka down his own throat any day of the week. My role is to play the son, though I often feel like a mob of peasants"). Although it's depressing, the book never seems hopeless, because readers know the author has succeeded at doing what his father only pretended to do: write, and write well.
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From Bookmarks Magazine
Poet Flynn was either fortunate or unfortunate enough to live a life so ripe for a good memoir. The events in
Another Bullshit Night are extraordinary enough to spur critical debate about whether the story would be better served in fictional form. In fact, the story is so enlightening that Flynn’s experimentation with narrative styles (one act plays, interviews, stream-of-consciousness) gets only cursory mention—a real free pass for book reviewers. The critics leap to call his prose poetic and lyrical, but it is the stark examination of homelessness and the paper-thin border between generations and lifestyles that gives this memoir its deep resonance.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
See all Editorial Reviews
- Paperback: 288 pages
- Publisher: W. W. Norton; Reprint edition (September 17, 2005)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0393329402
- ISBN-13: 978-0393329407
- Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
- Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Nick Flynn has been dealt a cruel hand. This memoir tells of the author's troubled relationship with his alcoholic father, his mother's suicide, and the tendency of all the family members to get caught up in criminal activities and drug addiction...and to live marginal, unsettled lives. Flynn's father spends many of his adult years living on the streets of Boston. Father and son reconnect because the son works in a homeless shelter. The father claims to be a poet and to have written a ground-breaking novel that Little Brown is prepared to offer him $2 million to publish (or $4 million, depending on the time of day and the degree of his alcoholic grandiosity). The literary connection between father and son is something that seems to haunt and frighten the younger Flynn. In the end, he seems to recognize that he is somehow his father's scribe and that the memoir he is writing is the "story" his father never mananged to get down on paper. "That book somehow fell to me, the son, to write. My father's uncredited, noncompliant ghostwriter. Not enough to be stuck with his body, to be stuck with his name, but to become his secretary, his handmaid, caught up in folly, a doomed project, to write about a book that doesn't, that didn't ever, that may not even , exist" (p. 322).
what is ironic, and somehow true-seeming, is that people who come from the most disengaged families turn out to be the ones who become the most enmeshed with their parents and who come most dangerously close to repeating their parents' mistakes. Flynn has insight to his family dynamics, but this doesn't seem to help him avoid the poinlessness of numbing himself out on drugs and alcohol or from forming anything but superficial, need-based relationships with women.
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