One of my all-time favorite books is Nick Flynn’s memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. It’s been most of twenty years since I first read it, and still moments and details swim back to me as I go about a day. The words of these pages haven’t been chased from my mind by all the novels, memoirs, stories, essays and work-in-progress I’ve read since, or by all the movies and Netflix and conversation, all the stress and love and bills and the rest it, all the days.
Open it to any page. The writing is…I want to say “captivating,” but that word feels packaged, dulled and overused, and doesn’t add enough to what I’m trying to convey. I might say “compelling,” but again…Compelling? Oof. The word falls flat.
The writing is…there, boom. On the page. Sentences swing forward, carrying a reader from one to the next…
“We got the acid from Sam. Sam lives in an old camper, the type you pull behind a car—rounded corners, a tiny sink, a table that folds down. He pays a farmer a couple hundred bucks to park it in a field for the winter…”
Just now, I opened the book at random. That is the passage I came to first. The words crash forward, in their directness and imagery.
In grad school, my friend Kevin Canty, now an author, used the word “propulsion.” I’m sure so many others have said it too, about writing. But I remember a particular moment when Kevin said that an essay, like a short story, benefits from a sense of propulsion, and I heard his words and nodded along. The term seemed perfect, instructional, helpful. This morning, though, in my own use, “propulsion” has morphed into one more clumsy way of reaching for something just beyond reach, an academic word for the feeling and purpose of a heartbeat.
The passage quoted above doesn’t represent the heart or tenor of this memoir, overall. But it does contribute to it. It’s one more heartbeat, keeping the pages alive.
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City is an oddly sweet book, a jagged-edged vehicle for one kid’s brokenness, grief carried into adulthood, carried into bafflement, alcoholism, longing, failure and ultimately a degree of success in being human, so far as any search for love and the self might go, stumbling forward.
The title kicks ass, like a good indie album, like a cold night and a can of beer around a bonfire. But the book is richer than the bravado of those particular words.
This morning I was thinking about the Beckett quote Flynn has used as a forward. Pulling the quote from Beckett’s one-act, absurdist French theater, Endgame, and moving into the front of the memoir, creates a new context, a point of reference, a dimension of meaning perhaps.
Nick Flynn’s father hoped to be a great writer. Instead, he became an unreliable narrator of his own life, an alcoholic, a small-time conman, running, of all things, a “fact” industry based on the use of a library and bravado. Nick Flynn, carrying on his father’s name, and perhaps some of his father’s weaknesses coupled with his own strengths, has written the book his father never wrote. This memoir makes writing—telling a family’s stories—into a multi-generational process.
Sometimes people—editors, professors…me?—will say that the first sentence, the first pages, establish a contract of sorts between an author and readers. These pages set up the POV, the tone, expectations…In many ways it’s true. But one part of the beauty of this particular memoir is that the delivery is always shifting, from chapter to chapter, and at times within chapters, until the idea that everything will keep changing becomes the foundation of any expectation at all.
Chapters lengths vary. Some are only as long as a paragraph, and others more conventionally delivered.
The book begins most closely aligned with the point-of-view of the author’s father, in a moment when the author would have been absent. What does that tell us, about any expectations we might hold, for the lives about to unfold in the following pages…? I think it speaks to the authority of empathy and envisioning, rather than mandating a kind of witnessing of events, first-hand, as one might conventionally consider the obligations of memoir, of facts, of “truth.” This author will tell us more than he could seemingly know.
In that first chapter, his father is involved in some imaginary late-night banking, a homeless man looking for an excuse to keep warm in a bank’s heated alcove of bank machines.
Other chapters are more directly first-person. One is written as an absurdist play, a doughnut shop version of King Lear, an inherited tragedy, a tragedy of inheritance. Once, I had a chance to ask Flynn about that chapter, in passing. He said he wanted to convey a complete psychological breakdown. It’s a round-about way of doing it, though certainly works.
There are short letters, notes.
One knockout section, “Same again,” is a long list of phrases people used to describe drinking, arranged in the shape of a story, the shape of a bender, rising and crashing and falling, then starting again.
While this speaks to the lure of alcoholism, that’s not the part that interests me so much as the intense love of language itself, an ear attuned to language.
People use words in amazing ways. We reveal ourselves through language.
Flynn has pulled together three pages of phrases, made them his own, built something new by compressing and composing them. Language taps into the mysteries of the human spirit, always to trying to express an inner world, an external connection, a longing.
I’ll stop there, but I could keep talking about this memoir.
Just thinking about it again, today. It’s a bleak story, in many ways, though made beautiful by the human heart and mind, made beautiful by becoming literature, in the best of ways.
Anyway, these are my enthusiasms!
:)
Captivated by your description. Just got myself a copy. Suck City here I come.
I love your write up for the book. I just snagged a used hardcopy from Powell's. Should be here in a week. Your enthusiasm for the word craft and style has me intrigued. Thanks for the book suggestion.