ANTHEM

NICK FLYNN: THE TICKING IS THE BOMB

Text: Scott Indrisek
02/09/10

Nick Flynn's wildly popular debut memoir, Another Bullshit Night In Suck City,
was an uncompromising look at family trauma, homelessness, and alcoholism.
Like Dave Eggers's Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius or Stephen Elliott's
The Adderall Diaries, Flynn's book proved that memoir could still be pushed in
fresh directions (and that great literature can still be alchemized from tragedy.)
The author, who is also a poet, recently released a second memoir: The Ticking
Is The Bomb. In it he examines his own impending future as a father-to-be in an
America that can officially sanction the sort of global torture most visibly exposed
at Abu Ghraib.

Flynn chatted with Anthem via email about James Frey, the nature of memoir,
and what whale deaths have to do with pyramids of naked prisoners.

We understand by now that memory is a fickle beast -- that thereʼs no such

thing as perfect recall, and that we canʼt accept non-fiction as an
unquestionable document of ʻwhat happened.ʼ Still, whereʼs the line
between poetic license and simply making shit up, as James Frey so
infamously did in his debut ʻmemoirʼ?

Frey once defended himself by saying that he only made up some small
percentage of those memoirs -- ten or twenty percent, I forget what he said. Iʼm
not sure if he would still say that, but the trouble with that thinking is that it acts as
if there is no cause and effect. That if you say, for example, that you were afraid
of going to prison on page ten, the reader will not remember by page fifty that this
fear is, or should be, coloring all your actions. I read The Snow Leopard recently,
by Peter Matthiessen, and I thought of Frey. Matthiessen lets us know, very
softly, in one part of one sentence in the first chapter, that his wife had died the
year before the events chronicled in the book. The book takes place in the
Himalayas, and yet everything gets colored by this grief, even if Matthiessen only
mentions her in passing, from then on. It contains the tension of the entire book.
If it had been false, if his wife hadnʼt died, then the entire book would be a dead
object, from page one, because of cause and effect. There is a physics to the
world, which non-fiction has a contract to stand in awe of, otherwise it becomes
completely self-centered and ego-driven, which is the death of a memoir.

The Ticking is the Bomb is about both Americaʼs role as a torturer in the
world (at Abu Ghraib, specifically), and your impending fatherhood. What
did all this research on torture do to your psyche, especially at that point in
your life -- when youʼre planning on bringing a child into the sort of world
that condones all this vileness?
The thing about larger political -- or environmental -- realities, is that they exist
within us all the time anyway, whether we acknowledge them or not. Those
photographs seeped into everyoneʼs psyches, just as every time a whale gets
killed we all feel it. We might not know thatʼs what weʼre feeling, we might do
something fucked up and blame it on the guy driving on the highway behind us
like a maniac, but weʼre all caught up in these patterns. The decision to have a
child was, for me, fortunately, mostly a movement out of these shadow psychic
realms.

David Shieldsʼs upcoming ʻmanifesto,ʼ Reality Hunger, calls for new forms
of writing that blur the line between genres like autobiography, journalism,
literary theory, the novel, etc. He seems pretty fed up with fiction, as if itʼs
a waste of time when one can be tackling the more serious work of essays
or memoir. How do you feel about fiction? Do you ever see yourself writing
a novel -- is there something you could achieve in fiction that the memoir
form does not allow?

Shields seems simply fed up with boring fiction, not all fiction, as far as I can tell.
Who can argue with that? Iʼve read part of Reality Hunger, and I think itʼs great --
thrilling. Itʼs a manifesto, and so, by definition, itʼs going to state something in the
strongest terms, to shake up some entrenched ideas. And then as soon as a
manifesto is published someone, usually younger, will need to do the exact
opposite. Itʼs how the culture lurches forward. I would disagree that any one form
should dominate the others, that these hybrid texts (which I am also more
interested in these days) should replace narrative. Any book thatʼs written well
has itʼs place. Iʼm more interested texts, either narrative or hybrid or whatever,
that engage the reader in an active, rather than a passive, way. I think Shields
would say that as well.

What memoirists would you recommend to someone who is interested in

what the genre can accomplish in the right hands?

So many friends and others are working in this genre that it is just easier to defer
to John DʼAgata, who has just published his second anthology of essays, The
Lost Origins of the Essay, published by Graywolf. His first anthology, The Next
American Essay, has an amazing range of voices and forms, and is a very good
place to start. John also has two memoir/essays of his own, which are great.

Iʼm willing to assume that this wasnʼt meant to be taken wholly seriously,
but…one blurbed review of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, from GQ,
says the following: “In a perverse act of divine intervention, a life worth
writing about was bestowed on a man actually able to write.” It seems like
that particular reviewer is a bit fed up with the glut of autobiography and
memoir on the shelves today -- sick of the idea that ʻeveryone has a story
to tell.ʼ What do you think? Are we confessing too much, writing too many
memoirs, stupidly assuming that each individual life is worth printing?
A life worth writing about? Arenʼt all lives worth at least that? When I read that I
understood the reviewer was saying that memoir seems like an easy way out,
that one doesnʼt need to be an artist to write one, but doesnʼt the same holds true
for all writing, not just memoir? This moment in time, with reality TV and a
seeming glut of memoirs, could be seen as a form of democratization, when
voices who hadnʼt had a chance to tell their stories are given a chance. And I
think, if it is done with integrity, it can make the world fuller. Whether or not itʼs
art, and will survive, thatʼs another question. But maybe itʼs enough that it exists
in one moment. I actually almost never watch any reality TV at all, except in hotel
rooms, and which always seems a kind of hell.