About Nick Flynn

Asking two memoir writers to have a conversation, as Ploughshares’ editor did when she suggested I write Nick Flynn’s profile, almost assures an interview without biography. Memoir writers are vague on matters of record. We’re interested in using fact and detail. We’re interested in the gorgeous influence of pain in all its mystery and nonsense. We’re interested in—and always, always testing—the weight of the story, so that we can decide where its emphasis must fall.

So how can I ask Flynn, “Where were you born and raised,” when he’s plumbed a heart’s desolation in a working-class Massachusetts town? How can I ask, “What has influenced you,” when he’s written with poetic grace and severity of his mother’s suicide? He’s answered the questions already in ways that are meaningful and powerful.

“Memoir seems to be a way to wake up to real life,” he says. “Real life will happen while we sleep, while we’re high, while we’re lost in whatever fog we lose ourselves in. Memoir, or any art, or any meditative practice, pulls back the cotton wool for a moment [quoting Virginia Woolf], to see how we are all connected.”

Memoir, if the writer has done his job, is not a revealing of the self but a construction of the self’s reality in order to explore that universal connection, a distinction that became clear when I sent a list of questions to Flynn and it came back partially answered. The questions he chose not to address pertained to his daily life, his child, his wife. The blank spaces he left after the personal queries were a message—Don’t come any closer. He protects his privacy, cloisters his real self.

A memoir writer I used to know (OK, my father), when asked about a detail of his life, biography of some kind, would say to me with a small, devious smile, “Read my book.” His joke, we both understood, was that he’d already answered the question in the way that was useful to him. It was difficult to nail down an answer that might provide facts.

When confronted by such a question as “What did your parents do for a living,” the memoirist can only squirm, deflect, evade. It’s not that he doesn’t have an answer. “Lousy jobs,” says Flynn. Of course. The artist wants to get a grip on the information first. He wants to let it be useful to convey a larger something—a feeling, a presence, or an absence; a joy, a glory, or a hope; a loss. Only then will he know what his parents did for a living. “Lousy jobs” is a perfect Nick Flynn answer, the slightly comic despair of “lousy,” the hardscrabble reality of “jobs.” We get it.

I don’t know Nick Flynn, not really. We met once. In person (if you want to trust me) he’s sweet if skeptical, flirtatious if aloof, commanding of attention yet he disappears right in front of you. We’d been invited to a weekend panel on memoir writing, but Nick did not arrive the first night. There were rumors: he’d had unexpected commitments, late appointments, something to do with his movie. The second day, suddenly, he was there. In he walked with an air of hard-core boyish daring, as if he’d moments before alighted from a helicopter on the lawn outside the hall. As we introduced ourselves—the firm handshake, the kind hello—his eyes, an intensity of ghostly pale color, bore into mine (I actually thought those Harlequin-romance words), and he was aware, I knew, of this hypnosis. It was a feint, a gesture of intimacy that presented a self, in order to obscure the self. He gave me—anyone—the feeling that he was intensely with me, which made me forget the fact that he wasn’t with me at all, not really.

Flynn was born in 1960 in Scituate, Massachusetts, to a socialite mother who had married a charismatic charmer of low birth, thus alienating herself from her family. As a boy, he liked to wander salt marshes. He went to high school, where he liked English and woodshop and didn’t understand much else. He went to the University of Massachusetts Amherst but dropped out. “I stopped being able to focus after my mother’s death,” he says. Later, in Boston, he worked as a caseworker at a homeless shelter, where he encountered, for the first time in eighteen years, his fabulist, alcoholic father, now homeless. He earned an MFA at NYU, where he studied with Galway Kinnell, Philip Levine, and Sharon Olds, among others, every person, every book, and every writer in his path a notable influence because, he says, “I was so hungry when I went there.” At various times, he has been a ship’s captain, an electrician, a waiter (“Fired from all restaurants,” he says). He is married with a four-year-old daughter, with whom he watches the sun rise during what used to be his writing time. “I’m less picky,” he says of what he needs now to write, which he does daily. “I just need a few hours and a table. A cup of tea. A place to piss.”

But you want to know Nick Flynn, really? Here: he writes. He writes because “it was always there, I don’t know why.” He writes because it’s the place he can bathe in words; he writes because he reads. He writes poems, plays, memoirs in “one long attempt to be awake to this world, and that attempt is the deepest influence.” At the moment, he is reading a lot about neurobiology; working on a prose piece about the making of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City into a movie; and attending every Occupy Wall Street event he can. “We’re recognizing we don’t have to ask for something, we can do it,” he says of the movement. “Waking up is always exciting—not to be fed passive information. So many of my friends by natural affinity are part of this. I run into many people I know and love. This is where we go now.”

I ask Flynn, “Are you happy?” I know it’s a vast-ocean question, not to mention a personal one. He says, “I have a joke: when I find myself in a particularly beautiful apartment or landscape, I say to my friend (it has to be an old friend), maybe even I could be happy here.”

—Susanna Sonnenberg is the author of the memoirs Her Last Death and She Matters: A Life in Friendships, which will be published by Scribner in 2013. She lives in Missoula, Montana.