Nick Flynn, author of 'Another Bullshit Night In Suck City', turned to drink and drugs to dull the pain of his mother's suicide. But even then he couldn't stop the past - and his father - from catching up with him, he tells Anna Mundow
You have met Nick Flynn's father. We all have. He's the loudmouth at the end of the bar. Big talker, big drinker, real chancer, greatest novelist since Hemingway. You have also stepped over him on the street. When Nick Flynn first visited Ireland, in 1997, he ran into his father all the time. "It was a nightmare working on this book in Dublin," Flynn recalls. "I kept seeing versions of my father on every corner." The irony was not lost on the young poet from Boston. Here he was, trying to write about his father, surrounded by living versions of a man who has always created grandiose versions of himself. Absurd coincidence and dark humour permeate Another Bullshit Night In Suck City, an extraordinary memoir that breaks every rule of the degraded genre. There is no self-pity or miraculous redemption here. Flynn's story of love, betrayal, poverty, booze, drugs, suicide and homelessness instead draws its power from the tense rhythm, vivid imagery and stark honesty of his writing.
Flynn enjoys wrong-footing people. Here he is, after all, with his memoir excerpted in the New Yorker and a producer already signed up to make the movie: he should be living in Manhattan, not in Athens, New York, a faded town on the banks of the Hudson river so reminiscent of the 1930s that Steven Spielberg has used it for his upcoming remake of War Of The Worlds. The 45-year-old writer is by now a literary celebrity. He should be ready for this interview.
Instead he is on his way to the launderette. Dark, slight and dishevelled, he is hauling two bags of washing onto his rickety front porch and rooting through his pockets for car keys when I arrive. I take one of the bags. "It's a great town," he says, driving the short distance along once-elegant streets that run down to the waterfront, their snow-fringed pavements empty except for a couple of old ladies heading to the library or the beauty parlour. "There's nothing here."
Back in the modest house that Flynn bought last year and is still fixing up he makes a quick stir-fry lunch while the Earl Grey brews. As I pour he points at the tea, saying: "It will darken up . . . now." It does, precisely when he says it will.
This nervous energy and rapid-fire speech is softened by earnestness, even guilelessness. "I didn't want this book to be a neat thing where somebody reads it and says, OK, I understand that. I want it to open up the questions: about responsibility, what it means to be related by blood, to be homeless, about the psychic homelessness of America now."
The story itself sounds familiar. Flynn and his elder brother, Thaddeus, grew up in Scituate, a rough coastal town south of Boston, with their beautiful, fragile mother, who left her drunken husband, Jonathan Flynn, when Nick was a baby and when Jonathan's scams had already landed him in jail. "There were some desperate times," Nick Flynn recalls. "We were always on the edge, getting food stamps, big blocks of government cheese. But in the 1960s - the good times, when my mother was earning maybe $127 a week as a bank teller - she was able to buy a house for $2,000. It's much harder now."
Growing up in a town famous for its hard drinking, little Nick collected his grandmother's "special" at the liquor store and once wrote a school essay about an imaginary weekend he spent skiing in "Vermouth". "My teacher did not correct this," he writes. "Maybe we were all skiing in a state of Vermouth." He started drinking early and progressed to drugs, girls and motorcycles. Then back to booze. Always booze.
While Flynn was a student at the University of Massachusetts his mother killed herself. She was 42. "After swallowing a fistful of painkillers she goes for a walk along Peggoty Beach. An hour later she comes back home, groggy. 'I was unable to throw myself in the ocean,' she writes, the handwriting more erratic as the painkillers seep into every cell, shutting out lights in empty rooms. On the last page of her four-page note she writes how she loves me and my brother and her father, before a voice comes into her head - Why don't you use the gun?"
Jonathan did not appear at the funeral. Years later, when he was sleeping rough, he waylaid his son one morning and boasted: "I'm not going to die out here. I'm not your poor sensitive mother. I'm a survivor." By that time Flynn was working at Boston's largest homeless shelter, numbing the pain and discovering a natural talent. "I engaged easily with the people there," he says. "Not so much the drunks but the psychs. I loved the way their minds worked. I could talk to them, and it would calm us both down."
Over the years he had received letters from his father - sporadic, bragging salvos - but he met him for the first time as an adult in the mid-1980s, when Jonathan summoned him. "The day he was evicted . . . he'd called on the phone, told me to get over to his room with my truck." Flynn had just one request of his father. Don't turn up at the shelter. "Two months later he appeared where I worked and demanded a bed." At the time neither Flynn was in good shape. Jonathan drove a cab for a while, slept in it when he was evicted from his rooming house, lost his licence when he blacked out on vodka and hit "someone or something". Then it was back to sleeping in doorways for five years, telling people that it was all research for a novel on homelessness.
Nick Flynn worked at the shelter from 1984 to 1990, drank plenty himself and got to know his father's routine. "The first of the month he gets his [welfare] cheque . . . buys a gallon or three of vodka." Flynn's cinematic description of the shelter and its hard cases is harrowing, often funny, never sanctimonious. He refuses to preach or swagger. His drunken self appears as just that, a drunken self, nothing special, sinking fast. "Whether you like it or not - you are me," his father wrote to him in 1987. "Eno tells me you are into drugs - if so - good luck."
Jonathan was voicing Flynn's biggest fear. "If I let him inside I would become him," he writes, explaining why he never gave his father floor space. "The line between us would blur, my own slow-motion car wreck would speed up." Instead Flynn proved his father wrong. Sensing imminent burnout, he reduced the number of nights he worked at the shelter and moved with a friend onto a boat moored at Provincetown Harbour, on Cape Cod. Hardly Walden pond, where the Transcendentalist poet Henry David Thoreau retreated in search of a simple, self-sufficient life, but it was a start. He travelled to Europe with his girlfriend, then to Morocco. Lots of drugs.
In 1988 Flynn visited a therapist who said he would not treat him unless he quit drinking and attended 12-step meetings. "I had to go to therapy to find out I had a miserable childhood," he jokes. He subsequently taught poetry in New York public schools, became a member of Columbia University's writing project and published two books of poetry, Some Ether and Blind Huber.
Sober for years, Flynn still rejects the handy labels that reduce the human condition to a list of disorders. "Somebody wrote a letter to the New Yorker saying that my mother had manic depression. Well, maybe. I don't know. What happened to my mother was a terrible tragedy, but that wasn't her whole life." He stands to clear the table, then pauses, a cup in each hand. "We really did have a happy childhood," he says, as if the idea has just dawned on him.
Jonathan always told his son: "In Ireland we were kings." While Flynn was living in Dublin with his girlfriend, the playwright Talaya Delaney, he recognised his ancestors all right: drunks rather than royalty, stumbling around the violent streets. "I saw more fights and more people vomiting in one week than I had in my whole life," he says. "And I've been in some rough places."
He has. His father still is. These days, however, Jonathan is housed and fairly stable. "When he's not loaded I enjoy his company," Flynn says. "So I try to see him at the end of the month. And since the book came out he's the most lucid, the least deranged I've ever seen him. People are interested in him, and it's as if he has to hold it together for that reason." Finally in print, Flynn's father is living up to the latest version of himself: his son's.
Another Bullshit Night In Suck City is published by Faber and Faber, £7.99