This book was great. Clearly I just randomly picked it up because of the title. A number of the themes in his life struck home with me and I just really wanted to know more. A very good read. I was finishing this book on the MAX to the airport about to fly away and I left this by a smoking area near the light rail, with the hope that someone would grab it to read. I hope someone did.

This book speaks of a complicated relationship between father and son, both of whom struggle with alcoholism, drug abuse and
some level of paranoia. Never having met him for the first 27 years of his life, Nick bumps into his father at a homeless shelter
where the former works. Their meeting seems contrived and the book, a work of fiction, however, it is a memoir, and therefore
true. As the years pass by, the interaction between the 2 grows more personal and Nick finds himself obsessing over the fact that
he is a replica of his old man. As he navigates his own life in the wake of his mother's suicide, multiple accidents, and alcoholism
and drug use, he finds himself unable to completely shut out his father. His father's legacy, which is to write a book and become
'The greatest writer America has yet produced' is unwittingly passed on to Nick who later describes this book as the only book
that will be written by his father (in a way).

To say that this book is poignant is most accurate. Not overly sentimental, nor shallow. It describes hard facts accompanied with
the effects it has on Nick's psyche. The narrative is partly poetic which, for me, adds to the lure of the book. The frequent jumps
in the timeline at the beginning of the book disengaged me, I'll admit, however the plot cements itself by the 50% mark, and from
there on it is an extremely fascinating read.

“Even a life raft is only supposed to get you from the sinking ship back to land, you were never intended to live in the life raft, to drift years on end, in sight of land but never close enough.”

This was a reread via audio. The memoir is as good, maybe better, than I remembered, but I wasn’t a huge fan of Scott Brick’s narration. I much prefer the print version and the original title (as ridiculous as it sounds). It just fits better.

This is a surprisingly compelling memoir that I lucked upon by accident. I found it at, of all places, a library book sale like Ex Libris and it turned out to be a real page turner. Flynn's prose is merciless in its depiction of madness as something to shunned. The father is a would be novelist who uses literature as his con, he is always writing the great novel, which of course he isn't. It becomes his excuse for alcoholism, drug use, and criminal behavior. As someone around these types, I can say they all have their delusions, nothing in this work really surprised me, but I too got pulled into the wanting to believe. Is loving someone meaning you have to accept their delusions and once you see thru them, can you no longer love them? This is one of the many questions this book asks.

I usually go for faster moving fiction, but this was very interesting and the writing unique and beautiful. I could clearly visualize Nick’s father, and became emotionally engaged with the family and the homeless society. A little slow in the beginning, but if you stay with it you will find a story that will continue to haunt and inform you.

I liked the movie, but the book is so, so much more. I really enjoyed all of the back history and the poetry in this novel. Definitely recommend.

Nick Flynn is a poet, and I don't really read poetry. I don't have a criticism of poetry as a whole, obviously- I mean, I might say I do, but if I did that would just be to be provocative and a pain in your ass- it's just hard for me to pay attention in the way you have to pay attention, and to really understand what a poem is doing.

We could argue about it, but trust me, it's my problem and it's not resolving.

So it was really hard for me to get into this book. Nick Flyyn is a poet, and he writes like a poet, choosing the perfect word for what he's saying in a way that doesn't mind tripping up your internal sentence- or paragraph-diagrammer. In a way, in fact, that trips those fuckers up constantly. Right? A way that makes you think about the way he's saying the things he's saying, as well as the things.

But by the end I had gotten into it: the Boston, the snow, the despair, the complicated relationship with the semi-delusional father. I mean, it's barely a memoir of Nick Flynn himself, right? There's at least as much about his father as there is about him.

And it's beautiful and smart and heartbreaking, sure, like books are supposed to be; I just had to butt heads with it the whole time I was reading it.

I loved this book so much and also meeting Nick Flynn was pretty darn amazing. He personalized this book for me with a sweet message. This was one of my best experiences.

Much of this book really worked beautifully. The spare language, the emotional distance, the imperfect memories and half-true tales. The Boston-area setting helped as well, if one is into local color. This one is.

A small handful--perhaps more of a pinch--of the later, more experimental selections went too far astray for my liking. And that's honestly too bad, because while I've no doubt the author has ready defenses and explanations that would instantly transform my opinion, as ever the author was somewhere other than at my elbow when I came across those seemingly out-of-step sections.

That took some inflation out of my overestimation of the book. For at least the first half, I had nothing but glowing things to say about the book. But then came those pieces in the second half, and the picture Flynn had been assembling became a bit clouded by those pieces that felt more self-indulgent than informative. Still, once a book's been published and has met with success, it becomes rather pointless to suggest edits. Would the changes have made it a better book in general, or would they just make it better for me?

A book about a father, about Flynn's relationship with his father, even though his father is rarely present in the story, certainly never fully present. Flynn is experimental, edgy, philosophical, but still maintains a narrative arc, a comprehensible story. I like this balance. The title itself announces his edginess, his unwillingness to simply write the story down Oprah style (and there is a big payout when the reader learns the origins of the title). The chapter called "Same again" is not narrative yet is central to the narrative. It is a poetyic list of drinking terms which goes on for four page "The usual I say. Blood of Christ I say. Essence. Spirit. Medicine. A hint. A taste. A bump. A snort..." The list reads both as a meditation and confession of the devastating impact of hard drinking on his father and on the author himself.

And: I'm predestined to engage and enjoy the strained father-son relationship story, most certainly because I have as yet to figure out my relationship with my own father. He both abhors and loves his homeless, crazy father. Can't stay far enough away but can't stay completely away and is haunted by him at every turn, especially when Nick starts to work in a homeless shelter. At one point his father tells him, "You are me." Paradoxically, he can neither fully find nor completely escape his father; maybe he can't fully escape him *because* he can't actually find him. And with supreme irony NICK Flynn writes an actual book about his father to fulfill? supplant? compete? render? the mystical, non-existent book his father, Jonathon, has "written" and talked about his entire life.

A favorite quote comes in the "aftermath," certainly non-standard Q and A at the end, where he answers the question "Was writing the book cathartic for you?":

"Whatever happens clings to us like barnacles on the hull of a ship, slowing us slightly, both uglifying and giving us texture."

I'm with him here: this is ALL that's left when we burrow deeply into the mess we call life.

"All my life my father had been manifest as an absence, a nonpresence, a name without a body... Some part of me knew he would show up, that if I stood in one place long enough he would find me, like you're taught to do when you're lost. But they never taught us what to do if both of you are lost, and you both end up in the same place, waiting."

Before learning Another Bullshit Night in Suck City was a memoir, I was struck by Paul Dano and Robert De Niro's performances in its film adaptation Being Flynn. It's a gut punch of a story: a young man is working at a homeless shelter and his estranged father enters its doors in search of a bed. I put off reading Flynn's memoir largely due to its mixed reviews and, I'll admit, that was a mistake. This is a memoir that deserves to be read.

Jonathan Flynn is a poet. Everything he writes is a masterpiece. He's no stranger at Boston's Beacon Hill and he regularly corresponds with Little Brown, Patty Hearst, and Ted Kennedy.

He's also a drunk, a father in absentia, a felon, and homeless.

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City is not Jonathan's story, but one written by his son, Nick, a promising young poet coming to terms with his mother's suicide, his father's homelessness, and his own addictions and afflictions.

While Jonathan might capture only half the air time in this memoir, you'll read it for him and for Nick's relationship to him. Jonathan is a complex character, complicated all the more by his delusions of grandeur.

"To be a poet digging ditches is very different from being a mere ditch digger."

Jonathan doesn't count himself a jailbird; he's been locked up only two years of his life.

No, Jonathan doesn't suffer from drunken blackouts, only "toxic amnesia."

Jonathan is a writer, perhaps one of America's finest, he's just holding out for a multimillion dollar advance from Little Brown for his cocktail napkin novel.

"If not for his cab my father will be outside. I have plenty of places to go, but no place to be. Easy to sleep in the cab, his hands tight on the wheel. He's not homeless, not yet, not ready for sleeping on the ground, not sober. Overnight the taxi becomes his room, the city his floorplan."

Nick, too, makes for a complex character in his own life story. For someone who counts himself reluctant to even see his father in the streets, he works a decade at a homeless shelter his father frequents. For someone whose thesis of being is that he's the antithesis of his father, he too considers himself a poet and a writer - he just succeeds at becoming a published one.

"Writers, especially poets, are particularly prone to madness. There exists a striking association between creativity and manic depression," writes Jonathan in a letter to his son, Nicholas. "Whether you like it or not - you are me. I know."

If you didn't know that Flynn was a poet before cracking the cover of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, it becomes readily apparent in his writing, with quotes like...

"Alcohol is the river we sit on the banks of, contemplating. Sometimes we watch ourselves float past, sometimes we watch ourselves sink."

And...

"The stage is done up like the outdoor space of an anonymous American city - broken neon, billboards of happy products, vast, empty. The light is dim, but we can make out figures draped in blankets, on benches, in doorways, beneath bushes."

Read the reviews and you'll think this is a rotgut memoir, but in all actuality it is very much top shelf.

5 out of 5

I assume that, like me, many people read a memoir the same way that they read fiction - with an expectation of certain plot points, general development of characters, plot/theme, or moral of the story. I also realize that this is a mistake.

So, if I peel that away from my feelings of the books (i.e. the expectations I have for traditional fiction), and consider this book strictly for what it is - a true story, one that cannot be manipulated for the sake of formula, then I say this is an excellent book.

However, since I am human and because my review may never be read, I can say that I wish that there was some kind of decision by the end of the "story."

Nick Flynn explores his own demons with drug addition - although, not deeply - and his personal conflict about working with the homeless while knowing that his own father is both an alcoholic and homeless. The fact that nothing is fully resolved by the end of the story reflects on his own humanity overriding ...well, my need to have him find closure.

He is a great story-teller, though. His balance of detail and illusion made this book a pleasure to read.