I am a sucker for memoirs.

For me, the experience is similar to reading poetry. I can catch narrators at their most vulnerable and open, when pain or circumstance propels them to craft an indelible image, or in the case of memoir, narrative. When poets publish memoirs, I find myself comparing their subject matter between two forms. But in reading the two together, at the same time, what do I discover about the writer? For some poets the subjects are simply too disparate to compare. In the case of Nick Flynn, and his memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, I got the opportunity to revisit the themes of his first book, Some Ether, in a new form.

Flynn’s memoir covers a lot of ground. In it Flynn asks the painful question, how did my estranged father become homeless? To discover the answer he starts at the beginning, piecing together the formative moments in his parents’ romance and breakup and analyzing the events of his childhood and adolescence. This back-story grounds the reader in the Flynn family dynamic, from the alcoholism that haunted his father throughout his life to the narrator’s own battles with chemical abuse. In his own way, the narrator builds the argument for the father’s eventual spiral into homelessness.

While Flynn traces his father’s footsteps, the memoir is far from linear. The narrative bounces between his father’s current state as a homeless shelter client, one that the narrator worked at for many years, and the near and distant events of Flynn’s childhood. In this structure, Flynn seems to arrange the book more as a poet than a prose writer. It is the reader’s role to apply each brief chapter to the larger narrative. This structure forced me to read the book in one or two long sittings, since I was rushing to arrive at the answer along with the narrator.

Some chapters are even anti-narrative, such as the short plays that serve as chapters late in the book. One of my favorite chapters is a list of synonyms for drinking, from “working on a scotch and soda” to “hair of the dog.” The chapter entitled “same again” ends almost every sentence with “I say.” For these four pages I felt immersed in the mindset of a chronic, desperate alcoholic. Taking the chapter alone, it felt like a poem. Reading the chapter in the context of Flynn’s story, I felt the desperation of both father and son, struggling with the same illness in their own ways.

After reading the memoir I picked up Some Ether, Flynn’s first book of poems. In many ways, these poems approach similar terrain as does his memoir. While the book of poems focuses on other events from Flynn’s childhood, notably his mother’s suicide, the language and images resonated with Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. For instance, the memoir covers time he spends in the summer resort Provincetown as a young man. Then, in Some Ether, he addresses the same experience through the poem “Emptying Town.” It’s a small detail, but the attachment he felt to the city (and the people he met while living there) is evident in both the poem and the chapter.

These shared details bind the two books together, making reading one almost a prerequisite for reading the other. These two seemingly personal books beg a larger question about the instincts of poetry and memoir. Both books use the narrative “I” and, considering their shared themes, seem to point to his personal background, the roots of Flynn’s writing. Both narrative and image share a constructed vision of similar events and hint at confession, but I am hesitant to call either of them “true”. After reading both books, I wonder how close the “I” in the memoir and the poems are to the actual author’s experience. I also wonder whether or not that matters to the work at hand, or if the artful construction of the experiences is enough.

~Jessica.

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Comments are open, for your ideas about Nick Flynn’s work, the relationship between memoir and poetry or any other poetry thought you might have. It’d be nice if were about books, but we won’t censor you.