This is Flynn's second memoir, after Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, and my second 5-star review for a Nick Flynn memoir. Flynn's books are stunningly smart, complicated in the best way, achingly sad, and somehow manifestly necessary.

Though similar themes pervade both books the books are very different from one another. This book, a series of essays, is far less linear than Suck City, and it covers more ground. For those who have not read Suck City (and you should get on that), or who have only seen the very mediocre film adaptation called Being Flynn, that book covers a time when he is reunited with his father, who had walked out on the family years earlier. One night Flynn's father shows up by coincidence at the homeless shelter at which Nick is working as he struggles with addiction issues of his own. A fair chunk of this book takes place during the time Flynn was writing Suck City. Nick is rambling about, bouncing from one country to another. Though housed and in a relationship with a woman (there is always a woman) in many ways Nick is no different from his rootless father. After some years of this wandering Flynn finds himself bouncing between two US cities and in love with two women. In a blaze of toxic masculinity Nick decides he will marry whichever one gets pregnant. (He was roughly 50 at the time so it was not the hubris of youth.) As it happens fecundity does not end up being the deciding factor, though in fact one of the women does become pregnant and it is the woman he ends up with. (He calls her Inez in the book, but it is Lili Taylor, unless he also had a baby girl with someone else actually named Inez at the same time.) The book juxtaposes Flynn's lived experiences with research he is doing at that time on Abu Ghraib. He mentions he had been planning to write a book about Abu Ghraib. and he shares some sickening stories from men who endured torture under the leadership of George W. Bush, but I expect he found there was not a book there. The lessons of of Abu Ghraib can be simply stated, and piling on the stories of the Abu Ghraib victims without furthering understanding or awareness would eventually become some sort of sick entertainment. Instead Flynn blended the prison stories with the process of getting the stories and with other events that. The interwoven stories lean to big questions about the value of life, the building of empathy, what it means to be a good person and more. I can't say these things are always woven seamlessly, but I certainly understood why he chose the life events he did as foils to the Abu Ghraib stories. To some extent all comes together with the birth of his daughter and the absolute rightness of fatherhood and the decision to be with and stay with one partner, In a way this is a coming of age story, if one comes of age at 50.

Flynn is a poet, IMO a very good one, though I am no expert (If I read 10 hours of poetry a year it is a banner year and my school days provided me little beyond the basics -- the Lake Poets and godawful stuff like Trees.) Trained by the rigor of poetry Flynn shows a facility with words that is breathtaking regardless of form. His prose sings, and there is not a wasted word. He draws connections that are profound and sound like nothing I have ever before heard. The man is brilliant, though cursed with the need to keep himself unhappy, as if grief and pain (whether some else's that he feeds on or his own) are the only things that will keep him rooted to the earth. He is a good man, despite the issue with the two women whom he loves but pits against one another to be his incubator. There are other things that might make you question his goodness, but so many more that make it manifest. And that goodness, that kindness, that truly radical empathy, is even more surprising when you read about his childhood and realize how little it was modeled to him. Any more than this will lead me to spoilers. With all my heart and all my brain I recommend this book. (But read Another Bullshit Night in Suck City First.) ( )

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Beautifully written, this "memoir" is perhaps too many things: Flynn further probes addiction, love, fatherhood, his family relationships, torture, the war in Iraq, the nature of truth, the failures of art in the face of evil. This is as much a work of poetry as it is prose but lacks the power of "Another Bullshit Night in Suck City", perhaps because Flynn is stitching so many threads together. Worth reading, though, well worth reading and reflecting on. ( )

There are a few books I'd like to mail to President Obama, not because I hope he'll read them and talk about them, and therefore get everyone else to read them (though that'd be nice) but because I think they say something about an important issue in a way that I simply can't. I could write Obama a letter about torture, about how I feel about it being used in my name, but it wouldn't achieve half of what Flynn does in this bizarre, floating memoir.Somehow, despite enormous odds, Flynn manages to tie together several disparate threads here -- his relationship to his parents (his mother committed suicide when he was in his teens while his father is an alcoholic ex-con who lived on the streets for years), his partner's impending pregnancy and the tangled route they took to being lovers, and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. In the hands of another writer, I might have found myself craving more of the personal and less the political (or vice versa), but Flynn does the balancing act, in part because he refuses to commit to the strictures of time, weaving together all the different pieces into a whole that is much larger than the sum of its already considerable parts.As one might expect from a poet, Flynn writes beautiful sentences and heartbreaking paragraphs. This is maybe the ideal book to read in tiny pieces, a bit here and there, as the mood strikes. Without a doubt, my favorite piece is "All living things have shoulders," about a scrap of paper he once found on the floor of a public school in Harlem. There are some incredible revelations in this book that Flynn delivers almost as asides (that his father may have been involved in the CIA's notorious MK Ultra program while serving time in federal prisons), and the notes at the end of the book are worth reading, particularly for their sense of humor, a welcome reprieve at the end of a very heavy, very emotional book. ( )

I love memoirs. They add richness to my own psychology by getting a glimpse into how others experience the human condition. The Ticking is the Bomb by Nick Flynn is definitely not an exception to my rule. He highlights a varied tapestry of emotion through his honest, engaging writing and creative storytelling. ( )