Well, you can see I chickened out and did not spell out the title of Nick Flynn's memoir in my title line.
Chickened out again. What can I say? It's not a title that rolls off my tongue or fingers, especially since I am not willing to try and research Google's policy in regard to posting swear words on Blogger.
In short, I do not want my blog censored.
That having been said, there's a reason a movie is being made out of this book. A revealing look at homelessness and the author's tendencies to follow in his father's footsteps, it's an original and entertaining read.
Jonathan Flynn aspired to be a brilliant writer. Instead, he was an irreverent drunk who wound up homeless.
Ah, the idle life of the homeless. Or so you might think.
Far from idle, they are ever shifting and roving, moving and never resting as they avoid both cops and real criminals. Wandering in search of some small space of solace for a minute or an hour, they seek a place to stop and lean without risk of someone bullying them out of their coats or liquor bottles. When the night is late and they can wander no longer, they search always for some place where they will not freeze or be beaten to death in the night.
Although a grim subject, Flynn tells it at a fast pace, in a way that kept me reading nearly straight through to the end. Nick scatters compelling cameos of his father's life through the pages as if he's scattering cuttings of the best outtakes from a film upon the floor.
I would give you a quote, but I don't want to take any surprises away from you. Each gem of description, each bit of narrative is a surprise and a pleasure you will want to discover yourself.
Like the path of a drunk, the narrative bounces and swerves in unexpected directions.
It touches upon Jonathan's youth and promise, bounces to the present, then rebounds back to his early marriage.
Back and forth it goes, like the shuttle of a loom, weaving a picture of a man.
Such great promise he had. Inventors in his family. Everyone thought he was brilliant. The Great American Novel was in his mind, damn it. All he had to do was sit down and write it out.
Or so he told himself.
I had to take time out for my own life; so reading this memoir stretched over three days, but I would have read it cover to cover without breaks if I had had the luxury of doing so.
This book clearly makes charlatans out of all the writing instructors and pundits who tell you never ever to write about yourself or your life, and who say memoirs never sell.
This book shows us that, when you write with wit and stay out of a "poor me" mentality as Nick Flynn has, you can really connect with your reader through the truth. No fiction need apply.
Now, whether you're willing to reveal as much about yourself and your situation as Flynn has is another issue.
But then, don't most of us write because we really want to spill all we've experienced and learned in this life so far, no matter who we expose in the process?
I've wanted to write about my mother for so long. Haven't done it because there is no way I can make a happy story out of her life.
At some point I swallowed that "rule" that readers want happy, Hallmark endings.
Yet, if I don't write about who she was, there will be no possibility of anyone else ever knowing who she was or what she went through. There will be no possibility that her experience - that my experience of her - could be redemptive or, at the least, informative for others. She, and any lessons from her life, will be forgotten.
So, is it better to let people like Nick Flynn's father and my mother be forgotten? To not air their depressions and delusions like tattered laundry on a gray line?
Or is it better to try to paint a picture that gets at the heart of why they were as they were?
What makes a person with so much promise like Nick's father - and my mother who was voted "Most Likely To Succeed" in high school and who won awards for scholarship - to self-destruct?
Flynn doesn't give the answer in his book, but he looks and, through his lucid eyes, I could not but help surrender any judgment about "drunks" as this son and his father circled past each other like twin moons around some invisible planet.
If you want to try and grasp why so many people are on the street, this book may help you.
If you came from a painful, dysfunctional family about whom you have longed to write, but you've been told "don't bother unless it's just for yourself" this book may give you the courage to write your own truth.
Warning: if you're squeamish about swear words, well, there are a few in this one because people who get drunk tend to use them.
But the quality of the writing and the story imparted is well worth any discomfort over reading a few swear words.
Or they should be.
Finally! Finished accompanying Thomas Cromwell in his incredible rise to power in Tudor England via Hilary Mantel's 
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