Another Bullshit Night in Suck City Review

The book I read was Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn. It was published in September of 2004 by W. W. Norton. He is 53 years-old and he has also written The Ticking Is the Bomb: A Memoir and The Reenactments: A Memoir  This is a memoir about Flynn's reunion with his estranged father, Jonathan, an alcoholic resident of the homeless shelter where Nick was a social worker in the late 1980s.

This memoir parallels Nick’s life as well as father’s. In one part the story, Nick describes his own teenage years in much the same way he describes the adult years of his father: lost, drowned in alcohol, and heading nowhere. "I see no end to being lost," writes Nick, "You can spend your entire life simply falling in that direction. It isn't a station you reach but just the general state of going down."

Unlike his father, though, Nick is able to pull his life together. Flynn ends up settling in Boston and gets a job at the Pine Street Inn, one of the nation's most active homeless shelters.

In 2012, the movie adaption for this story was created. The movie was entitled Being Flynn. It starred Robert De Niro as Johnathan Fylnn, Julianne More as Jody Flynn, and Paul Dano as Nick.

“The boat has become supreme isolation, chosen isolation, holding myself apart from the world, which I only dimly understand anyway. I can sit on the aft deck and never be surprised by anything again- no phone will ever ring, no one will knock that I haven't seen coming for a quarter mile. that I can go to sleep any night and wake up having broken loose- a failed knot, a line frayed, the anchor dragged- that I can drift out of sight of land makes a twisted sense, in line with my internal weather. When everything has proven tenuous one can either move toward permanence or toward impermanence. The boat's sublimely impermanent. Some mornings the fog's so thick that I exist only in a tight globe of clearing, beyond which is all foghorn and unknown.”

Another Bullshit Night was a great story. A heartbreaking story. Nick Flynn throws himself towards the blunt trauma of history, towards his fear of what he himself might become. It is a story of self-discovery. In the end it is about family, about fathers and sons and how painful it is to know the depth of that relation at its fullest.