★ 05/18/2020
In this outstanding work, poet and playwright Flynn bookends his first memoir, 2004’s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, with this unsparing look at his early childhood and his mother, who died by suicide when Flynn was 22 years old. He makes a series of visits to his hometown of Scituate, Mass., with his young daughter and describes his solitary childhood spent living with his mother in a small, “ugly” house that she bought after she left Flynn’s father. When Flynn was seven years old, his mother set fire to the house, an event he is still trying to understand: “Maybe my mother set our house on fire not merely to collect the insurance money, but simply to see what it was that she was losing.” His return trips are not only a chance to tell his daughter “where your father came from” but also to deal with his own unhappiness that led him to cheat on his wife. He comes to a realization that “we are so lost inside ourselves sometimes that it is impossible to think of other people, even those we love.” Readers will devour this powerful memoir of letting go. (Aug.)
06/01/2020
Flynn (Another Bullshit Night in Suck City) once again revisits his childhood to probe the house fire he survived at the age of seven. He later learned, after seeking out one of his mother's old boyfriends, that she deliberately started the blaze in their asbestos-filled house to collect insurance money. His mother, Jody Draper, died by suicide when Flynn was 22, and she remains a mercurial figure for both readers and, seemingly, the author. He is searching for the connections between his traumatic childhood and his present-day unease, which include extricating himself from a years-long affair he began shortly after he married his wife, the actress Lili Taylor. One longs for Taylor's perspective, but she is treated here, as with Jody and Flynn's nameless lover, like a background prop. His most significant relationship appears to be the one he shares with his daughter; their bedtime stories and musings are interspersed throughout, frequently centering on a phantom-like figure from Flynn's childhood named Mr. Mann. VERDICT There is clearly a lot to mine from Flynn's youth, but this memoir is both disjointed and illusory, featuring imagined monologs from Flynn's mother to engage audiences further. Best for die-hard fans of Flynn's first memoir. [See Prepub Alert, 1/29/20.]—Barrie Olmstead, Lewiston P.L., ID
★ 2020-07-01
A new memoir from Flynn, showing a writer who refuses to be bound by the conventions of form.
Much like his previous work, Flynn’s latest is a collage that mixes narrative, reflection, literary and film criticism, fiction, fantasy, and ruthless self-interrogation. That it works should surprise no one familiar with the author; he has an uncommonly nuanced voice and sensibility, and he holds little back. Flynn begins with his young daughter and a story he has told her “about a man who lived in the woods behind my grandmother’s house.” He quickly admits, “obviously there’s a lot I leave out of the stories I tell my daughter.” Here, that includes his own marital infidelity, the story of which comes framed (emotionally, at any rate) by a set of revelations about his mother, who burned down the family house when Flynn was 6 years old. The fallout of that event runs throughout like a vein of ore, casting everything that follows in its dancing light. “John Cassavetes once proposed,” writes the author, “that when a character can’t find his way home, that’s where the story begins.” Certainly, that’s the case here. Unraveling his past in a series of short prose fragments, jumping around in time, Flynn excavates his history from an angle, as if he can’t bear to look at it head-on. Yet, as the book progresses, the author reveals nearly everything, from his mother’s suicide to the slow build of his affair with a woman who lived 1,500 miles away. For Flynn, there is a line connecting these events, an attempt to exert some sort of chaotic control. “Maybe my mother set the fire to find that sense of control as well,” he writes about their shared sense of complicity. Memoir is a genre of complicity, a form that thrives on questions and filling in the gaps, especially when information is conjectural or scant. Flynn plunges headlong into such a territory, endowing his book with a palpable sense of risk.
A remarkable and daring work, a song of both family and self.
"This latest memoir in Nick Flynn’s remarkable body of work is at once tender and searing—suffused with longing, ruthless self-inquiry, intellectual rigor, and most of all, desire: desire to remember, to forget, to forge a family, to blow it all to smithereens. I read it on the edge of my seat."
"Master of the lyric memoir, Nick Flynn has done it again. In This is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire, he weaves a hypnotic path through memory that is part nightmare, part fairy tale, part antihero’s journey, and tolling at every turn with the haunting voice of a past that refuses to stay gone…If all such sobering truths could be rendered with the beauty of his sentences, we might be better able to hold them."
"The enthralling performance of Nick Flynn’s prose (vast, lyrical, and philosophic) takes us once again to the smoldering haunts of human loneliness and the possibility of walking with sight. Against the backdrop of a marriage seeking firm ground and fatherhood that feels, at times, Sisyphean, such a transfiguring imagination as his allows us to realize memory curates language toward understanding and no aspect of the human journey is tangential; it’s full of miracles, grace, splendor, and fire."
"Nick Flynn writes like a wicked angel—heartbreaking and challenging yes, but with an undercurrent of comfort that comes from the fact that you can trust this voice. We need this book, now more than ever."
Charles Constant's narration is earnest and reflective, a good fit for Flynn's confessional memoir, which takes listeners into his memories and experiences at a granular level. The work is centered around the night his mother burned down his family’s house and his attempts to understand her actions. He also focuses on his fame after the success of his first memoir, which was focused on his mother’s suicide, and the ethical dilemmas that followed. And he ruminates on his role as a father and spouse, as well as the nature and consequences of his choices. These memories, sequenced as nonlinear short stories, thread together with quiet power, emphasizing the phenomenon of leaving versus being present for others. Constant takes a quiet, almost pensive, approach, inviting listeners into the intimate space Flynn has created. S.P.C. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine