Your scheduled cooking posts will return shortly. In the meantime here's book post #1 for the 2011 To Be Read Challenge:
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City is Nick Flynn's memoir of his early life and his relationship with his absent, alcoholic father.
The book moves back and forth between Nick’s story - including his gangster-dating mother, traumatised war vet stepfather, and longtime girlfriend Emily - and a fictionalised reconstruction of his father Jonathan's life, based on interviews and letters.
Father and son have very different trajectories to their lives yet share joint fixations on writing, alcoholism, and petty crime. The two narratives will parallel, contrast, and finally overlap when Nick is twenty-seven and working in a homeless shelter, and his father shows up needing a place to stay.
"Sometimes I'd see my father, walking past my building on his way to another nowhere. I could have given him a key, offered him a piece of my floor. A futon. A bed. But I never did. If I let him inside I would become him, the line between us would blur, my own slow-motion car wreck would speed up."Looking at this purely at a factual, narrative level this story could have gone down so many tired old paths (son tries to reconnect with estranged father, young man finds himself through writing, etc) but usually resists that tidiness, that faux moral-making that I find really repugnant in most memoirs.
Despite the downer material and a sometimes painful depiction of a screwed-up family, it's a powerful, page-turning read that feels emotionally honest. The writing is lyrical, sometimes too self-consciously so, but mostly fits well with the book's blend of memoir, fact, and reimagining. It's also a compelling, unromanticised, uncondescending look at homeless people and what it means to be homeless.
My 12 To Be Read books
2011 To Be Read Challenge
No comments:
Post a Comment