Nick Flynn, memoir/non-fiction

Flynn grew up on Boston’s South Shore. He spent six years working in the Pine Street Inn, a Boston homeless shelter. In Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Flynn recounts his tumultuous childhood and family life—with the uncanny trajectory that ultimately led his homeless father to seek shelter at the Pine Street Inn while Nick worked there. Poet Mark Doty opines, “Nick Flynn has given us one of the most terrifying families in American letters, though he approaches each character in this ferocious, inventive memoir with an almost radical sense of compassion, as if all that any of us could do were to stumble ahead with the burdens we are given. The result is a book so singular, harrowing and loving as to be indelible.” Another Bullshit Night joins the ranks of a small group of unforgettable late twentieth-century American memoirs, such as Mary Karr’s The Liars Club, Frank Conroy’s Stop-Time, and Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life.

The Judges’ statement for the 1999 PEN/ Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry declared, “Nick Flynn's subject—a mother's suicide, a son's peripatetic childhood—could not be more difficult to approach. If [his] poems stand ‘close to tragedy,’ as Flynn puts it, they also embody the act of survival: syntax and line conspire to pull us past the event, beyond the struggle. And yet the ghost of trauma lingers, ramifying beyond the exquisitely understated endings of Flynn's poems. Even more powerful than the final line of ‘My Mother Contemplating Her Gun’—‘Tomorrow it will still be there’—is the silence that follows it, the knowledge that nothing lasts. These poems establish their emotional authority through their very movement—their wayward, whispering music. At once reckless and demure, outrageous and delicate.. . . .“