Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir [Hardcover]

Nick Flynn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 17, 2004

"Devastating....Ranks with Frank Conroy's Stop-Time."--Michael Cunningham

"Sometimes I'd see my father, walking past my building on his way to another nowhere. I could have given him a key, offered a piece of my floor. But if I let him inside the line between us would blur, my own slow-motion car wreck would speed up." Nick Flynn met his father for the third time when he was twenty-seven years old, working as a caseworker in a homeless shelter in Boston. As a teenager he'd received letters from this stranger, a self-proclaimed poet and con man doing time in federal prison for bank robbery. Nick, his own life precariously unsettled, was living alternately in a ramshackle boat and in a warehouse that was once a strip joint. In bold, dazzling prose, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (a phrase Flynn senior uses to describe his life on the streets) tells the story of two lives and the trajectory that led Nick and his father into that homeless shelter, onto those streets, and finally to each other.

Editorial Reviews

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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 347 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition (September 17, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393051390
• ISBN-13: 978-0393051391
• Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 1.2 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (67 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #179,080 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #42 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Regional U.S. > New England

More About the Author

Nick Flynn is the award-winning author of Some Ether, Blind Huber, The Ticking is the Bomb and Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, winner of the PEN/Martha Albrand Award. He divides his time between Texas, where he teaches at the University of Houston, and Brooklyn, New York.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

104 of 113 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Heartbreaking, Comical and Endearing January 9, 2005

By prisrob TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Nick Flynn's prose in his book "Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir" has the feel of a great writer. He is able to capture the essence and flavor of the homeless, the shelters, the life and times of a young man who is trying to find his way.

Nick Flynn's father, Jonathan, told him when he met his father at a homeless shelter, "that life on the streets of Boston was just another bullshit night in suck city". How aptly that must describe life of the homeless. Jonathan was an aimless man looking for the quick buck when he met Nick's mother, Jody. Jody was from an affluent family, and the young man was given many chances by this family to succeed in one business after another. Dad just couldn't make it- alcohol, drugs and lack of responsibility took precedent. Dad left the family, wife and two sons, and left them on their own. He went from job to job, drug to drug, prison to no real life on the outside, and became a homeless person. Nick during this time grew up also looking for drugs and alcohol, and finally cleaned up his act. His mother committed suicide and left him bereft. He saw his dad a couple of times, but they were not successful meetings. Nick went on to become a case worker at a homeless shelter in Boston. His bold writing of life in the shelter gives us a very clear idea of the sadness, humility and humanity that makes up such a life. Into this setting comes Jonathan, the dad. How strange to meet your father at your job, particularly at a homeless shelter. This meeting led to a father/son relationship, of sorts. Nick's brother wanted nothing to do with his father and absolutely refused to see him. Nick is left to form a relationship of sorts; one born out of grief, hate and of course, love. The pattern of the relationship is parental- the son becomes the parent. But during this time Nick learns about his father and mother's life and is able to distill old demons. And, he is able to start his novel.

Nick Flynn has created a large disturbance with this novel. It has been well received because of the story and because of his writing. This novel grabs you, and it is hard to put down. I look at the homeless in a different light. When I walk the streets of Boston, I shall look at the bus stops, "T" station and other areas where homeless congregate in a different manner. This novel is an eye opener, and it deserves unprecedented praise. I shall keep an eye on Nick Flynn- he has a future. Highly recommended, prisrob

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars the 'get real' version of 'my fractured life'... July 19, 2005

By Peter Baklava

Format:Hardcover

[...]It's tough to review a book called "Another Bull---t Night in S--k City" without using profanities, you know?

Which brings me to the one lamentable thing about the book: an unfortunate title, which may drive potential readers away from a great read. Though the title prepares you for something like Charles Bukowski, this book is another type of bird, entirely. It is a remarkably decent book written by a conscientious human being who also happens to be a conscientious writer who cares greatly about his craft.

Nick Flynn laces together the frayed ends of his mother's and estranged father's failings, along with desultory tales of his own early carelessness. Life in Boston in the 80's is about keeping afloat. As Nick retreats to living aboard an old pleasure boat, he watches his father steadily sinking in a tide of alcohol abuse. Nick assiduously avoids his father until circumstances bring them together at the Pine Street Inn, a homeless shelter where Nick is employed, and Nick's father becomes a resident.

The irretrievably damaged father, Jonathan Flynn, wanders these pages like Banquo's ghost. Even in his youth a flim-flam man, Jonathan Flynn is not likeable. He is semi-coherent, devious, and deluded, but he is Nick's father and Nick cannot run from him anymore than he could run away from himself. This, then, is the story of Nick's coming to grips with his father, and finding his own purpose.

Nick Flynn's achievement is that he writes what should be a very depressing story in an undepressing way. There is not an ounce of self-pity in these pages, and the words all ring true. The twilight world of the homeless is evoked, with great compassion.

Would that all the clueless 'go-getters' of the world had this book. It would enrich their lives.

40 of 45 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Like father, like son September 3, 2005

By Charles S. Houser VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

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. He does seem to progress from open fear and hate of his father to an authentic, but realistic sense of compassion for the man who was never there for him.

ANOTHER NIGHT is pretty much a chronological account of Flynn's experiences, but it is written in various styles. Some of these work nicely and bring a welcome change of pace and infusion of energy to what is otherwise a depressing storyline. In a chapter called "Same Again" he does riffs on the varioius cliches about drinking you are likely to hear in a bar on any given night. The change of genre he does in the chapter "Santa Lear" seemed less successful. Here, he depicts as drama the exchanges between a number of drunks doing seasonal work as Santa Clauses and their "daughters" (social workers?). But overall, Flynn is a keen observer with a writing style that is poetic without being florid or unnecessarily terse. I'm curious to see what he'll produce next.