Another Bullshit Night In Suck City. Nick Flynn. ( W.W. Norton, N.Y., N.Y.) $24.

Memories of the past haunt us. Sometimes we try to drown them with booze, drugs, or we leave to get a pack of “Camels” and never return. Nick Flynn, acclaimed poet and writer (and our featured reader at the “Somerville News Writers Festival”, was not able to escape his past, or in a word…his father. In Nick Flynn’s visceral and evocative memoir “Another Bullshit Night In Suck City,” Flynn can’t only escape the memory of his ner-do-well, booze-soaked father, but his flesh and blood father haunts the streets of Boston where Flynn lives, and at times the downtrodden dad is a denizen of the “Pine St. Inn,” a homeless shelter that Flynn was employed by. His father fancied himself a writer, and may indeed have had latent talent, but it rarely saw the light of day. Flynn, a poet first, has infused a wonderful sense of lyricism in many of the passages written about his father. He conveys the love, and hate, for a man who was a stranger to himself, and his son.

One of Flynn’s primal fears was that he would end up like his father—a man with a rapidly fading fantasy of the writing life, holed up in a cheap furnished room in a Beacon Hill rooming house—or worse yet sleeping on the grates in front of the Boston Public Library. In this passage, Flynn writes about seeing his homeless father walking the streets:

“Sometimes I’d see my father walking past my building on his way to nowhere. I could have given him a key, offered a piece of my floor. A futon. A bed. But I never did. If I let him inside I would become him, the line between would speed up. The slogan on the side of a moving company truck read: “Together we are going Places—modified by a vandal or disgruntled employee to read: “Together we are going Down.” If I went to the drowning man the drowning man would pull me under. I couldn’t be his life raft.” (11)

Flynn was well aware that he was traveling the same perilous road as his father. For years, like his father, he fancied himself a writer, but he was starting to succumb to his own demons: drugs, drink and the cage of a worthy but dead end job at the shelter. Flynn writes:

“I’m fast becoming the one who leaves things behind, who blows a rod and pulls into the breakdown lane and unscrews the plate and walks. Who puts his stuff in your basement and never returns. Who steps out onto a sidewalk in a small city, into the stifling car, without his shoes, without remembering he was even wearing shoes; or even wore shoes.” (118)

With the help of a therapist, Fynn managed to get out of the hole he was fast sinking in, and was able to get enough insight into himself, and the burden of his fallen father to move on. In a letter from his father’s friend, Flynn gains insight into his father’s futile charade, which eventually leads Flynn to get his own act together.

“I always felt your father didn’t like himself a lot, that he had a self-destructive side wider than most. That he carried around a sense of failure. You kids were an important part of his life, he would read to me the letters he wrote you, yet it always seemed like he was punishing himself for his failures as a father. Eventually he made a business of being a failure—if he was close to success he would sabotage it. The one role he held on to was that of being a great undiscovered writer—it allowed him to lash out in anger, it became his job to straighten the world out, to point to exactly how he’d been mistreated. The art world allowed him to get away with extravagant and excessive behavior, it encouraged it. His life became a raging performance, piece scripted by Jonathan Flynn. This allowed him to stay in control of something in his life. It became all presentation.”

Not all of us would have the strength to pull out of this maw of despair. Flynn did—and in a way realized his father’s dreams.

Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update