Given all of the critical bemoaning surrounding the rise of the "nobody memoir," it is strange that this masterpiece is not cited as evidence for the genre's potential as a conduit for social justice. In this work, Flynn shows that memoir can, despite what critics claim, achieve the very opposite of narcissism. Flynn combines personal reflection with social reporting with the subtlety of a poet. In doing so, he makes a more convincing argument for social reform than could have ever been achieved by a mere journalist, essayist, or novelist. It is the combination of the personal and political that enables Flynn to articulate the most sophisticated portrait of the complexities of American homelessness in recent memory.

This book was so sad. As my husband would say, such a waste of potential. This book also hits close to home for me. How each family member reacts to their upbringing is so interesting. Some seem to adjust just fine, go through the steps of life, doing what is “expected” of them. Others, like Mr. Flynn are angry and self destructive. The one positive thing that I can say is that Mr. Flynn’s writing is most certainly cathartic. I’m so glad that he has found success in this. For the rest of his life, I wish him luck.

At this point Nick Flynn is my new lit crush. I loved his approach to memoir in telling a story that's not so easy to take about addiction, homelessness, father/son drama and trauma. Collage, vignettes, mishmash, mixup. Call it what you will, he had me at Bullshit. I'm anxious to see the upcoming movie with Robert DeNiro playing his dad. Before I knew there was going to be a movie, DeNiro is who I pictured for the not-so-humble elder Flynn.

This book was interesting to me because the author is a caseworker working with homeless folks which is what I used to do. I found it unfortunate that he seems characterize all homeless folks as either drunks or psychotic (or both) when in reality people are homeless for many reasons- domestic violence, disability, illness or injury, lack of affordable housing, lack of transitional support for people leaving institutions, hospitalization or prison, youth kicked out of the house for being queer, escaping sexual or physical abuse, as well as addiction and mental health issues. I also object to his occasional use of the term "the homeless" as I find this term incredibly depersonizing. And I thought the case notes he referenced were really unprofessional. Overall I think the shelter he worked in seemed to have a real prison-like atmosphere and that my own experience was very different.

I think my favorite part was the entire chapter devoted to colloquialisms for alcohol and drug use.

prose written by a playwright and poet.
the way flynn weaves back and forth in time without making the reader seasick felt like a miracle. in memoir, it can be so easy for the writer to just tell the story chronologically “this then this then this then this.” flynn’s writing techniques here are so creative and different. an original story told in an original way. i know they turned this into a movie with robert deniro but the book was so good that i have zero interest in seeing it. i feel like this story doesn’t work as a movie or audiobook… so much of the beauty is in the way flynn skillfully rendered and presented the facts.

edit: can anyone recommend memoirs that play with form in a similar way?

I love Nick Flynn's poetry. Some Ether is one of my favorites.
I figured that I would read his memoir, and it has a great title!

It's about him meeting his father for the first time in the homeless shelter where he worked.

I'm not that far into it, but already stunned by the double entendres/subtext that describes what's happening in the story as well as the emotional landscape.

So far, so beautiful.

A quick and interesting read punctuated by moments of extreme brilliance.

unconventional, blunt, devastating

I'm a fan of sparse prose, of scarcity inside words that allows the reader to draw greater imagination out of text. I read yesterday that older video games, 8-bit and 16-bit, draw the player into the gaming more than the millions of pixels versions because they require the gamer to draw more connections inside their imagination, to create inside their mind.

With that said, this book is the perfect example of want of semantics being confused with want of emotions. Perhaps that is the author's goal; to create a text in which the memoirist is just beyond the reader's grasp. We fill in emotion for the author, create and project our own feelings of paterfamilias disappointment onto the character.

The author succeeds in language; he is very obviously a poet who wrote a memoir, not a memoirist who writes poetry. Is it a failure to the reader that the author skims over his own feelings about the life he lives in favor of retelling events from an almost impartial perspective?

I think that I wouldn't be filling in the blanks today, on my own, thinking more and more about the book, if it didn't hold that clean, unfettered prose so close to the chest.

I first fell in love with this book as a college Junior in my first Contemporary American Literature course. I loved its nonlinear structure, experimentation with mixing genres and poetic allusions. I now return to it about once a year, particularly when I'm struggling with my own alcoholic and perpetually absent father, as a kind of sense-maker for my own world.

Gorgeously written and beautifully somber

Nick Flynn brings his poetic style to this work of creative non-fiction, the biography of father and how he came to know him. The writing is good, the chapter divides are excellently timed and dramatic as the stops at the end of his poems. The reflections on his mother's suicide and his father's homelessness are neither maudlin nor cold: he manuevers himself through his own story like a underwater diver clearing through kelp. One of the best books I've read all year.

Also, if you ever get the chance to see  Nick Flynn read, I highly recommend it. He's personable and gives a good show. Ask him if he remembers the blue-haired girl from Reed College that gave him a comic about his "Bag of Mice" poem.