The Ticking Is the Bomb: A Memoir [Hardcover]

Nick Flynn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 18, 2010

A dazzling, searing, and inventive memoir about becoming a father in the age of terror.

In 2007, during the months before Nick Flynn’s daughter’s birth, his growing outrage and obsession with torture, exacerbated by the Abu Ghraib photographs, led him to Istanbul to meet some of the Iraqi men depicted in those photos. Haunted by a history of addiction, a relationship with his unsteady father, and a longing to connect with his mother who committed suicide, Flynn artfully interweaves in this memoir passages from his childhood, his relationships with women, and his growing obsession—a questioning of terror, torture, and the political crimes we can neither see nor understand in post-9/11 American life. The time bomb of the title becomes an unlikely metaphor and vehicle for exploring the fears and joys of becoming a father. Here is a memoir of profound self-discovery—of being lost and found, of painful family memories and losses, of the need to run from love, and of the ability to embrace it again.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Award-winning poet/author Flynn (Another Bullshit Night in Suck City) uses his daughter's imminent birth as a springboard to examine personal and political shakiness. Flynn jumps back and forth in covering his rocky childhood (his parents: a distraught, hard-living single mother; an ex-con, mentally wrecked father who was largely absent from Flynn's childhood), his struggles with women and sobriety, and adjusting to his daughter's arrival. Throughout this swirl of heartache and introspection, Flynn becomes obsessed with torture and America's acceptance of it after the infamous photos from Abu Ghraib are released. It's clear that Flynn is lost in his own life, and that he needs to find himself, or at least some stability, not just for his daughter's benefit but for his own. The accompanying narrative structure may isolate those who prefer a more straight-ahead style—the poetic interludes and scattered focus are sometimes more distracting than artistic—but Flynn's life is so volcanic and his writing style so kinetic and punchy that others will be drawn into this gripping personal narrative. (Jan.)
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From Booklist

Flynn continues the saga of his battle with the demons he inherited from his mother, who committed suicide, and his alcoholic, ex-con, sometimes homeless father, the focus of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (2004). In this finely crafted mosaic of edgy beauty, ambushing drama, and unsparing reflections, Flynn wrestles with the questions of how and why we hurt each other and ourselves, and what pain does to us. Flynn examines his struggles with addiction, his problematic relationships with women, his father’s last days, his experiences as an “itinerant poet” in New York City’s public schools, and the impending arrival of his first child within the maelstrom of horrors, grotesquely documented, rising out of Abu Ghraib. When he travels to Istanbul to help collect testimonies of the Iraqi men detained for dubious reasons, tortured, and photographed, he is forced to confront the mystery of brutality. Haunted, compassionate, fearful of failing as a parent, Flynn pursues the deeply disturbing subject of torture into unexpected spheres, seeking understanding of our obsession with power, acceptance of suffering, and transcendent resilience. --Donna Seaman

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 283 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; First Edition edition (January 18, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393068161
• ISBN-13: 978-0393068160
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.9 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #198,528 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Gripping, Unforgettable Look at Torture, Abu Ghraib, Love, Family, Fatherhood and Language, December 31, 2009

By 

Rachel Kramer Bussel "Cupcakes Take the Cake ... (New York City) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Ticking Is the Bomb: A Memoir (Hardcover)

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.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Torture and Love and the Space in Between, April 1, 2010

By 

Gail D. Storey (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Ticking Is the Bomb: A Memoir (Hardcover)

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.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Incredible talent, March 3, 2010

By 

E. Dunne (San Francisco) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Ticking Is the Bomb: A Memoir (Hardcover)

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.