This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire: A Memoir
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4.2 • 5 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A searing memoir on how childhood spills into parenthood from the critically acclaimed author of Another B******t Night in Suck City.
When Nick Flynn was seven years old, his mother set fire to their house. The event loomed large in his imagination for years, but it’s only after having a child of his own that he understands why. He returns with his young daughter to the landscape of his youth, reflecting on how his feral childhood has him still in its reins, and forms his memories into lyrical bedtime stories populated by the both sinister and wounded Mister Mann.
With the spare lyricism and dark irony of his classic, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Flynn excavates the terrain of his traumatic upbringing and his mother’s suicide. This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire unravels the story of the fire that Flynn had to escape, and the ways in which, as an adult, he has carried that fire with him until it threatens to burn down his own house. Here Nick confronts his failings with fierce candor, even as they threaten to tear his family apart. His marriage in crisis, Flynn seeks answers from his therapist, who tells him he has “the ethics of a drowning man.”
This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire takes us on the journey of a man struggling to hold himself together in prose that is raw and moving, sharp-edged and wry. Alternating literary analysis and philosophy with intimate memoir, Flynn probes his deepest ethical dilemmas.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Major events in our childhood tend to shape who we become. Unfortunately for poet, playwright, and author Nick Flynn, one of those inescapable moments happened at age seven when his mother set fire to their house—with him still in it. Now a parent himself, Flynn attempts to finally come to grips with his mother’s painful legacy in this strikingly candid memoir. Taking his daughter with him to his Massachusetts hometown, he revisits the places and moments that shaped his wayward childhood, confronting intense traumas like his mother’s eventual suicide. In the same way he tackled his relationship with his homeless, alcoholic father in his stunning 2004 memoir, Another B******t Night in Suck City, Flynn absolutely bares his soul about not only his broken childhood, but also the fallout in his adult life. It’s clear that Flynn will plumb his darkest and messiest depths to create his art. The result is a memoir that is at times beautiful, at times a little chaotic, but always unmistakably him.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this outstanding work, poet and playwright Flynn bookends his first memoir, 2004's Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, with this unsparing look at his early childhood and his mother, who died by suicide when Flynn was 22 years old. He makes a series of visits to his hometown of Scituate, Mass., with his young daughter and describes his solitary childhood spent living with his mother in a small, "ugly" house that she bought after she left Flynn's father. When Flynn was seven years old, his mother set fire to the house, an event he is still trying to understand: "Maybe my mother set our house on fire not merely to collect the insurance money, but simply to see what it was that she was losing." His return trips are not only a chance to tell his daughter "where your father came from" but also to deal with his own unhappiness that led him to cheat on his wife. He comes to a realization that "we are so lost inside ourselves sometimes that it is impossible to think of other people, even those we love." Readers will devour this powerful memoir of letting go.
