Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn

There were moments like that, where I was in his head, and I sort of wanted to tip my hand a little bit. As you were reading the beginning of that, I actually thought to myself, 'Well, maybe that's just something I thought.' That line was in and out of the book, so I'm happy I ended up keeping it. ' Then you step back and write, 'Or maybe that's just what I have thought, the times I've fallen.' It's a revealing moment, where you seem uncomfortable speaking for him, conscious of the fact that some of the narrative is conjecture. You write, 'As he falls he thinks, If you are hurt they will come with their ambulances, they will put you in bed and feed you, they will let you rest. I'm thinking specifically of a passage where you describe your father falling from the ladder. In a sense, you had to animate him, think for him because you weren't there. That part was an excavation.ĪC: I wonder how it felt to be writing your father's life. I'd do that maybe four times over one day. I would write for another hour and then I would fall asleep again, it would just keep happening.

It was really this sort of accessing of the unconscious in some way. Then I would wake up and start writing from that point. I would sleep and I would have a dream, and in the dream I would figure out where to go in the writing. I'd reach some sort of an impasse, a psychic impasse, where I just couldn't move forward in the writing. I would actually fall asleep on the floor of my studio for 20 minutes to half an hour. If I had a whole day, I would write for an hour and then be completely exhausted. It was really draining, psychically speaking. The first thing was doing research and putting things together, but then I had to try to figure out what it meant. Nick Flynn: There were a couple years of the writing, once I had gathered all the stories together, that felt like deeper psychological work. How was the experience of writing the memoir different? Was it less or more emotionally exhausting? 29 issue.Īustin Chronicle: You've dealt with some of your family's history in your poetry, specifically in Some Ether. Below is an extended transcript of the interview for 'The Weirdness of Life: Nick Flynn on Another Bullshit Night in Suck City,' a profile of the author in our Oct.

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn