Oh god this book is so incredibly good. One of the endorsements on the back says something like, Finally someone whose life is worthy of a memoir happens to be talented enough to write a good one. Yes, yes! I wish I had come up with that line!***********************************************Just finished reading this book again. After the disappointing mess of The Frog King, I had to read something I knew was phenomenal, to reaffirm my faith in literature. And oh, thank you, Nick Flynn, I love you...

Originally, I read this book in 2008, but it was well worth reading again. This is not your ordinary memoir!

another postmodern turd in craptown

I don't actually think this book is bad at all, but I put it in this section because I couldn't get through it, despite really, really wanting to. In my opinion, this book has the most brilliant title in recent memory, and the cover art is simply gorgeous. I so badly wanted to like it, at least enough to get through it, so I could at least carry it around with me and enjoy its black, green, and yellow loveliness!Sadly, I could not. This probably has less to do with the book itself, which I'm sur...

Posted at Shelf InflictedThe bold and colorful title and cover caught my eye at the library. I wasn’t sure I wanted to read another depressing memoir about homelessness, but since it took place in Boston, a city I’m quite familiar with, I decided to give it a go. There were some darkly humorous moments, as I’d expected from the title. Overall, this was a poignant, honest, and intense story about Nick Flynn’s relationship with his absent, alcoholic, and delusional father. I learned after I starte...

“Even a life raft is only supposed to get you from the sinking ship back to land, you were never intended to live in the life raft, to drift years on end, in sight of land but never close enough.” This was a reread via audio. The memoir is as good, maybe better, than I remembered, but I wasn’t a huge fan of Scott Brick’s narration. I much prefer the print version and the original title (as ridiculous as it sounds). It just fits better.

Now here goes a book that is creatively non-fiction...If you want to read a book that breaks all the rules, while hearing the survival story of a boy who is abandoned by his mother and homeless father, read this book. No chronology here--in fact the writer abandons form as you may know it--but the writing doesn't need it. Hardcore and straight-forward (as if you can't tell from the title). Not your average book, and this is what makes it a good contemporary read.

I was reluctant to give this five stars--it's not an easy experience. But it's definitely amazing. Don't confuse it with just another quirky family memoir: it has emotionally raw and real things to say about alcoholism, mental illness, heredity, and the homeless. (Each person from the shelter is drawn so distinctively it makes you realize how reductive and dismissive the term "the homeless" really is).I make it sounds harsh and dark--which it is--but there is also a deadpan sense of humor runnin...

Nick Flynn is a poet, and I don't really read poetry. I don't have a criticism of poetry as a whole, obviously- I mean, I might say I do, but if I did that would just be to be provocative and a pain in your ass- it's just hard for me to pay attention in the way you have to pay attention, and to really understand what a poem is doing. We could argue about it, but trust me, it's my problem and it's not resolving. So it was really hard for me to get into this book. Nick Flyyn is a poet, and he writ...

The credit for this book’s colorful title goes to Nick Flynn’s dad, the main protagonist in his memoir of coming to know himself through a chance reunion with his father. The story initially focuses on the early parallels between young Flynn and his estranged, alcoholic father. The author then brings us to a Boston homeless shelter where he held a minimum-wage job for 5 years after living alone on a houseboat near Boston Harbor. Father and son’s lives fatefully intersect in the shelter when his

I spent a lot of time while reading this wondering who I know that will be resigned to a fate similar to that of the father in these memoirs. Who will wind up past the prime of their life having talked for years of what they will accomplish and have really accomplished nothing? I can unfortunately name a decent sized handful of people who run this risk at this point in their lives. Closer to thirty than to twenty, and wasting months of their lives on drinking binges, babbling about their potenti...

Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City tells the story of himself as a confused young adult who struggles to avoid following his long lost father’s footsteps to homelessness and misery. The book is set at Situate, Massachusetts, also known as “Suck City”, to the city of Boston around the time of 1960’s to 1990’s, when Nick’s father, Jonathan Flynn, was a young adult to present time when Nick, himself, is a young adult. Trying his best to avoid becoming the “town’s drunk” and failure j

To love books about addiction and troubled parents is the inheritance my mother passed on to me. I guess that’s something. As Flynn reminds us, there isn’t any shortage of people who prefer substances to their loved ones. How the loved ones of addicts choose to deal with and make peace with their addicted father, or sister, or mother, or girlfriend, or whatever is as personal as a jawline. It’s formed and gritted individually through experience. We keep chewing the insides of our mouths as we wo...

Nick Flynn’s pathos-packed memoir is part coming-of-age story and part counter-culture-chronicle, part mental-illness menagerie and part generational-reconciliation-project. His poetic past serves him well, manifesting in image shards and lingual leaps that strike chords that vibrate in a reader long after she puts down the book. Like life, there is no tidy resolution to this story, no miraculous recovery for his addled dad—as the narrator ages and matures, he’s just able to manage better and ta...

I first fell in love with this book as a college Junior in my first Contemporary American Literature course. I loved its nonlinear structure, experimentation with mixing genres and poetic allusions. I now return to it about once a year, particularly when I'm struggling with my own alcoholic and perpetually absent father, as a kind of sense-maker for my own world.

Man. This book is beautiful. It reads like a Springsteen song mixed with homelessness and hard drugs. Or maybe a sober of Alan Ginsberg. Maybe a sober Alan Ginsberg is basically a low life Springsteen. Anyways, beautiful prose. The writing flows like a mountain steam, not too much, not too little. Just babbling along.

A book this honest could easily be taken as bleak and depressing, but Flynn weaves the story of his relationship with his father with the look towards redemption and hope that make this an amazing memoir.

A darkly humorous and poignant memoir, though I know that is not at all how Nick Flynn would describe it himself. Flynn has a voice all his own that elevates this honest, somewhat tragic story with levity and blunt truth. The guy has style, it's of the frayed and utilitarian variety, but it is uniquely his and it makes for a golly-gosh-darn-good read (again not how Flynn would put it).This is not a memoir with a purpose beyond telling the story, beyond exploring one's truth as they have seen it,...

The verdict: Strong 3-3.5 stars.I saw the movie first (Being Flynn) before even knowing it was based on a book. The movie was fair, yet I'm glad that the book is very different. Whereas the movie focuses nearly entirely on Nick's relationship with his father once dad shows up at the homeless shelter, that is only a small part of the book. In that sense, the structure of the book is akin to Moby-Dick. "In Moby-Dick, the eponymous whale doesn't appear until the last fifty pages. The story of the w...

With a style vaguely reminiscent of the Beat generation novels, Flynn tells a story that's purely his to tell. +10 points for referencing many Boston locations I'm familiar with, including the Pine Street Inn, one of the largest homeless shelters (and now, long-term housing providers) in the area.