Customer Reviews

The Ticking Is the Bomb: A Memoir (Library Edition)

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The Ticking Is The Bomb is a deceptively powerful memoir. It starts off being about love, family, falling for two women, and continues to be about that, while also delving deep into Flynn's past, especially his mother's suicide and his father's homelessness and their strained relationship. He starts out by musing: "For me, `dating' often felt like reading Tolstoy--exhilarating, but a struggle, at times, to keep the characters straight. The fact that the chaos had been distilled down to two women--one I'll call Anna, the other was Inez--felt, to me, like progress."

He weaves all this, along with his partner pregnancy and later the birth of his daughter, in with his research into the United States government's use of torture, and what this means, to him, the U.S., and the world. There is a strong connection here to Stephen Elliott's The Adderall Diaries (Elliott makes a brief appearance here when he introduces Flynn to a dominatrix friend, Mistress Yin), in that both veer from the personal to the political and back in a way that could be disconcerting but isn't because it's so masterfully done, and because Flynn finds the connections between the two. What's beautiful about this book is that it isn't simply an indictment of torture, though it certainly is that, as Flynn details his experience listening to testimony from those who were photographed and tortured at Abu Ghraib, along with varying reactions to the publication of those photographs, but that each image, each word, each snapshot of a moment, gets layered upon what's come before and plants the seeds for what will come after.

There's poetry to the way The Ticking Is The Bomb flows, a way that a simple word like "handshake" gets transformed into an act of betrayal, and Flynn returns to the images and themes he's introduced us to in often unsettling, but gripping ways. Oh, and the notes at the end are as powerful as any of the rest of the book, weaving in Janet Malcolm on the impact of suicide and some chilling thoughts on the likes of DOJ attorney John Yoo and others involved in the Bush Administration. Flynn works his way from zombie movies to drinking to lovers to travel to grammar to love and fatherhood. Though this is indeed a memoir, memory is questioned repeatedly, with Flynn making readers think through the same questions he ponders over the meaning of his mother's suicide note, over what a given photograph (or photo caption) actually means. The shortness of the chapters only serves, like the best short stories, to highlight their intensity, and, unlike standalone short stories, they merge to create a whole that's starkly honest in its complexity.

Nick Flynn's THE TICKING IS THE BOMB is a memoir of sheer genius, heart and heartbreak so artfully juxtaposed that one deeply intensifies the other. I couldn't stop reading, couldn't turn away from the prism of torture, addiction, his mother's suicide, his conflicted relationships with women, illuminated from within by love--for the tortured, addicted, suicidal, and especially for Inez and the baby in her womb. The structure of the memoir is brilliant. The short sections allow us to take in the power of Flynn's consciousness and the beauty of his writing. We breathe in the spaces between, we exist in them.

I just finished this and - having read his other memoir and his poetry - I think it's his strongest work. He is an incredibly talented writer and brutally honest. His style of weaving together memories, observations, revelations is incredibly engaging and poignant. I can't recommend it enough.

I really liked Nick Flynn's first memoir - whose title Amazon won't let me write as they have a censorship policy of no profanity in any book review and there are two "profane" words in the title - so when I saw the review for The Ticking Is The Bomb in the Sunday LA Times, I didn't even bother to read it. I didn't want someone else's opinion to get in the way. Luckily I was meeting a friend that afternoon to hang out in the rain, and we had decided to first meet up at Skylight Books - where I bought their next to last copy.

Flynn's also a great poet, which, at least in my opinion, greatly influences his writing. He doesn't get all wordy. He uses sparse strong language to convey hard subjects. In The Ticking Is The Bomb he writes of torture, love, fatherhood, relationships, suicide, childhood, pain, and expectations - he does it beautifully. His chapters are short, poignant, and at times heartbreaking - one that deals with his stepfather, a Vietnam vet, and his quest for forgiveness actually caused my eyes to mist.

I admire Flynn's style. Perhaps because I'm so damn wordy. My writing yammers on and on and around page twenty I get to the point. Compact prose is something I am trying to learn. Reading Flynn I take notes. Because this is how writing should be done.