Street Emotion

NICK FLYNN'S MEMOIR OF HELL, HOMELESSNESS, AND FAMILY HAPPINESS

While working at a homeless shelter in Boston in the late 1980s, the poet Nick Flynn occasionally spotted writers and actors slipping into the general population on reconnaissance missions. "That wasn't why I was working with the homeless. It felt wrong to take those people and transform them into my own work," Flynn says. "Then my father showed up, and, well, that changed that."

In an age where sappy, ham-fisted, this-is-a-teaching-moment memoirs threaten the deforestation of the planet as much as McDonald's does, Flynn's Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, out this month from Norton, is a remarkable feat: a clear-eyed, inventive, and astonishingly honest guided tour of hell. Growing up in Boston, Flynn and his single mother shared a dependency on booze and drugs, and patched together a life out of paper routes and petty work for gangsters, while his estranged father—a charismatic con man, aspiring writer, and unrepentant drunk—sent the rare missive from prison, where he was serving time for bank fraud.

Years later Flynn's father, homeless and raving like a deposed and half-mad king, would suddenly careen back into his son's life, just as Flynn's own downward spiral was starting to pick up speed. As fascinating as the story of the reconnection between father and son is, equally remarkable is the way Flynn soberly and poignantly captures the true lives of outcast and marginal men without ever being preachy or scolding. "Hey," he says, "none of us are saints."

ELISSA SCHAPPELL