There are many memoirs being published today. Many one has to ask of, why? Not this one. The narrative is gripping, the story moving, and the overall the book is incredibly powerful. I strongly believe that one of the, if not the only, purpose of literature is to give a moral message to the reader. And this book does that and some. I ended up giving $20 to a homeless man on the subway while reading this book. Seriously. I feel much more empathetic to people that I often do, and that really means that this book is a success. There are, however, a couple points I wanted to raise with it.

The first is literature. Here is a man who is a writer, wants to be a writer, and has written his autobiography. One then does he barely talk about writing? Seems weird. It comes up at the end, and there are a handful of literary allusions (King Lear being prominent), but for most of the book one thinks he's a normal kind looking for jobs to survive, and really with no dreams of anything but surviving, and getting high. But he obviously does. What gives?

Secondly, what happened to the rest of the characters? Nick Flynn himself is there. But barely anyone else, including the father, who this book is, kind of, meant to be about. Mother, barely there. Brother, barely there. Long term girlfriend, barely there. Friends, hard to keep in touch who is who. While I do think this book succeeds in moving the reader and giving a moral message, why without characters? Haven't you read Dickens? It's a good way to do it.

And lastly, I'm not sure if this book is really that well written. I mean, it does move quickly and easily. But I suspect it might be because of the gripping story rather than the style. For someone who turns out to be poet this is a bit strange. In contrast it does show how powerful this story for the writer himself. And this can be a rare thing. It does come across as cathartic exercise--and perhaps the story is so important to the writer that he can't help but write it without elaborate, analysis, or tricks. And I am being a bit harsh here, since I did like some of the Lear references and the way he turns his absent father, both in reality and in often in the book, into a anti-hero who the hero cannot really come to terms with. How does one express this? Perhaps the only answer is by being straight up.

Overall though, I rushed through this book, it did move me, and I'm very glad to have read it. Not sure if I'll go to the movie however.

Nick Flynn is a talented writer, and has written an outstanding memoir about his relationship with his father, Jonathan, who is a down-and-out self-absorbed alcoholic with delusions of grandeur. Nick has his own issues, which are interesting too: his mother's suicide, his father's absence, drugs, sorrow.

Throughout most of Nick's life, Jonathan was defined by his absence. But eventually Nick grows up and spends years working at a homeless shelter, which is where he and Jonathan cross paths. Initially Nick keeps Jonathan at arm's length, but eventually he starts seeking him out in an effort to know him. He plans his visits by the time of the month, based on the welfare cheque cycle...no point visiting when Jonathan can afford to be completely obliterated, because he will be.

Nick has no illusions about his father. He's not hoping for anything, like sobriety or love. A father like that could provide a never-ending supply of disappointment if one were to pin one's hopes on him. At least he got a book out of it. A very good book.

This memoir avoids falling into the "Poor me" trap that plagues so many memoirs about dysfunctional families. It's believable, interesting, and not at all maudlin.

I'm not sure why people are considering this a "post-modern" book. It is not a book that plays games with language or with the reader. This book is a very felt, lyrical act of imagination on the part of the writer to try to understand his parents' alcoholism and mental illness. He calls himself his father's "uncredited, noncompliant ghostwriter," and I think he means that fully sincerely. Much of the book is not about Nick Flynn at all (even though this book is subtitled, "a memoir,"), but is an attempt to imaginatively inhabit the world of his homeless father. It's a brave book, like Cheryl Strayed's Wild in its unflinching and persistent exposure of the self, of truths about the self most of us would prefer to not to drag into the light.

To love books about addiction and troubled parents is the inheritance my mother passed on to me. I guess that’s something.

As Flynn reminds us, there isn’t any shortage of people who prefer substances to their loved ones. How the loved ones of addicts choose to deal with and make peace with their addicted father, or sister, or mother, or girlfriend, or whatever is as personal as a jawline. It’s formed and gritted individually through experience. We keep chewing the insides of our mouths as we wonder what will happen to the people we care about as they enjoy their slow immolation.

If Chuck Palahniuk wrote Catcher in the Rye this would be the result.

Just as with movies, I feel compelled to finish something once I start it. And, even though a movie is a mere couple of hours whereas a book takes much longer to complete, I still feel no less of a obsessive-compulsive drive to finish a book once I start it. As you can imagine, then, it takes a really, REALLY bad book to get me to put it down unfinished.

This book was exactly that.

There was no clear direction or purpose to the book—and I finished more than half of it! I found myself wondering: is this memoir supposed to be humorous (even poignantly humorous, a la Running With Scissors)? If so, it missed the mark by a mile. I cracked no more than one or two half-hearted smiles throughout the first half of the book (and, worse, I seemed to have noticed a couple of overt attempts where the author seemed to be trying way too hard to crack a joke, but fell flat).

Okay, maybe, it’s supposed to intricately reveal some sort of a cathartic development of the author (or of his father)? If so, that missed by a mile, as well; I couldn’t sense any sort of connecting thread or development throughout all the jumbled anecdotes. It seemed like a scattered mess of thoughts, back and forth in time, with no apparent rhyme or reason.

Or, it could be that this is some artistic, brilliant, new, avante garde type of memoir… and that I just didn’t get it. Well, okay, that could very well be; however, I have enough self-regard to strongly doubt that nonetheless, and to have instead come to the conclusion that this book was a waste of my time, and left me wishing I had spent the time on something else.

I have to add, though, that considering the book deals with some major events that would have a profound effect on anyone’s OWN life if experienced firsthand—it’s a real shame that the author couldn’t find a way to draw on that human empathy and narrate it in a way that would have done such experiences the justice it likely warranted.

A book this honest could easily be taken as bleak and depressing, but Flynn weaves the story of his relationship with his father with the look towards redemption and hope that make this an amazing memoir.

This is the memoir that every creative writer in college wishes they could make. Splendid writing, fantastic shape and structure, Nick Flynn did an amazing job. The title alone makes this book worth reading. But the complexity of emotion is what makes this work truly sublime.

This book made me wonder about memoirs as a genre. What makes a good memoir anyway?--my first thought would be the value of reading someone's memories about crucial past events, to maybe provide a new or alternate viewpoint. Or that they would be able to put a personal stamp on something that seems too complicated to grasp otherwise--like Elie Wiesel's Night. Sometimes, though, memoires seem like the literary equivalent of reality TV.

Another Bullshit Night in Suck CityABSNiSC is the type of memoire of someone embroiled in difficult circumstances, and how they succeeded or failed at dealing with them. That's respectable, I think--Nick Flynn, the author, is a poet, and so the book sometimes reads like a long prose poem; short and punchy, lyrical--but aside from technical skill, the book is less 'memoire' than Flynn's not-unusual bumpy road to maturity, and how he seizes on his father's situation as a mirror in which to better peer into his own navel. In and of itself, I wouldn't immediately say that this is a bad thing, but at the age I am now, it doesn't resonate well. Maybe if I'd read this in my early 20s, I would have thought that it was tragically hip and cool, I don't know. Probably some vestige of that earlier me was what was attracted to the title in the first place.

To be clear: Flynn doesn't use his father's absence and subsequent homelessness as an excuse for his own behavior--he doesn't even get to know him until he's in his late twenties--instead it's that he's stumbling around in his own life, and looks toward his father for some clue as to his own identity, or future self. And that, I think, is essentially why the book left me with a nagging feeling of 'so what'. I get that it's hard to grow up--I had a heckuva time with it myself--but that story doesn't interest me much anymore. All the struggles, all the angst--especially when a talented writer really wrings the juices out of the story--make me think, 'well, when you're older, this won't seem nearly as important to you as it does now.' The same thing I try NOT to say to my middle-school daughter, though I can't help thinking it with her situations either.

Ah well. If you like personal memoires, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City is probably as worthwhile as most of the others.

It's as good as everyone says it is. I like his ability to write pretty straight-forward passages and then do some weird poetic tangents.

Rare for me to read a memoir, and especially one that isn't sport related, but Nick Flynn's book was recommended on a couple of the blogs I follow, though published in 2005.

A large part of the book deals with his relationship with his father who despite having been successful in his earlier life becomes homeless, is heavily involved in drugs and alcohol and spends some time in jail. Flynn therefore becomes more aware than the average person of the problem of homelessness and works in Boston's first Hostel for such people.

The first two thirds of the book are quite readable and enlightening about seedy Boston life in the 70s and 80s, and what it's like to live on the streets or indeed in a Hostel. But as Flynn's own life becomes more and more involved with drugs it's gets less interesting and failed to hold my attention.

It’s really good. It’s poetic, it’s tragic and really inspiring. If you ever wanted to write, but were doubtful, pick this book up, it’ll give you a needed nudge.