THE MILLIONS

How Do I Get Home? A Profile of Nick Flynn

By Rebecca Keith, 5 feb 2010

When Nick Flynn drives around his hometown, Scituate,

Massachusetts, he inevitably passes the houses he lived in with his mother and
brother—six of them within the first five years of his life. In the past few decades,
unsurprisingly, money has been pumped into Scituate, a small coastal city, but
amid the explosion of seaside wealth, every house Flynn lived in looks worse for
the wear. “Theyʼre all still there,” he tells me, “sort of falling apart, with the same
paint I painted on them just peeling off in sheets.” Itʼs an image that could be
lifted straight from a dream—or one of his poems in Some Ether, or a chapter of
one of his memoirs, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City or the newly published
The Ticking is the Bomb. These ghost-houses are emblematic of Flynnʼs
writing—homes slowly being erased, shadowed, built on shaky foundations or
none at all, people and places eroding. I imagine Cape Cod-blue houses, freshly
painted, or creamy McMansions next to the scattered avocado green, tan, fading
yellow of Flynnʼs childhood homes. I ask if he ever knocked on the door of any of
the houses; he says he went into one years ago, but hasnʼt since. “Thereʼs no
pitbulls in the yard, but thereʼs something sort of up, like troubled people live in
these houses. Itʼs really strange. Itʼs not like the whole town went into disrepair.
Itʼs just the places we lived in.”

In the past decade, Flynn has lived in Rome, Dar es Salaam, and divided his time
(as writersʼ bios are wont to say) between teaching at the University of Houston
and living in New York, either in Brooklyn or his house upstate. Fluidity of home
and identity carries through Flynnʼs writing. In The Ticking is the Bomb, Flynn
writes about buying his house upstate several years ago. “My natural born
restlessness only seemed to grow the more days I spent there. Rooted? I ended
up staying in the house only to work on it, and then Iʼd leave… I moved around
more those first two years of owning a house than I ever had—I was vapor, I was
air, I was nowhere.”

The Ticking is the Bomb is a process-oriented memoir—in short, about the

torture condoned by the U.S. government in recent years, juxtaposed with Flynn
readying himself to become a father. Dated (but not chronological) vignettes mix
with surreal extended metaphors which, while part of the narrative, I had a hard
time convincing myself were not prose poems. “This book could have been
poetry,” Flynn says. The first pieces Flynn wrote, before he knew he was writing
his next memoir, were four long poems; they remained in the book up until its last
edit. Flynn says the poems “became four pillars, scaffolding, that the whole book
was built around. Then I took them away and the book was there.” (The poems
will appear in Flynnʼs next collection, The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands, out
later this year from Graywolf.)

The Ticking is the Bomb opens with a sonogram of Flynnʼs unborn daughter—“a
dream sleeping inside the body of the woman I love” and shifts rapidly to “another
set of photographs” one of which Flynn describes plainly as depicting “a naked
man being dragged by a soldier out of a cell on the end of a leash.” These other
photos, Flynn writes, “also have the texture of dreams—shadowy, diaphanous,
changeable.” In 2004, like most of us, Flynn heard of Abu Ghraib for the first
time; he didnʼt know if it was “one word or two, a building or a city, a place or an
idea.” In the course of the next few years, he became part of a handful of what he
calls “torture people” and traveled to Istanbul to meet some of the men victimized
by American soldiers. At the same time, he was slowly extricating himself from
one relationship with a woman while falling in love with his future partner and
mother of his child, the actress, Lili Taylor (called Inez in the book). Flynn says,
“I began looking at torture without really recognizing that I was also enacting
some kind of darker impulses myself. As I pushed into it, I realized there were
echoes of the larger culture in my life. Not to make any equivalents to them, at
all. But certain brutalization or suffering thatʼs being sowed.”

As immensely personal as The Ticking is the Bomb is, it pushes readers to

acknowledge, if not meditate on, the urges lurking inside us, those we tamp down
in order to continue, to resist the impulses (conscious or not) to hurt ourselves,
the ones we love, even those we donʼt. As Flynn comes to understand what heʼs
writing about, within the book, he says, “Maybe I should tell anyone who asks
that Iʼm writing about Proteus, the mythological creature who changes shape as
you hold onto him, who changes into the shape of that which most terrifies you,
as you ask him your question, as you refuse to let go. The question is, often,
simply a variation of, How do I get home?” This is a book full of shape-shifting
and slow alterations of character. How do you face other Americans who find the
inhumane treatment of people acceptable and even justified? How do you look at
a man who says the soldiers who made him stand on a box, hooded, resemble
you? How do you transform into a parent after passing the age at which your
parents imploded? How do learn to let go of love that is unhealthy?

As I prepare to meet Flynn to discuss The Ticking is the Bomb, I try to separate
questions into thematic areas, but they fold in on each other, along with images
from the book. There is a photograph of Flynnʼs mother holding a can of Schlitz,
wearing a blond wig and sunglasses— “the Grifters photo” he calls it; his fatherʼs
apartment, stacked to the ceiling with newspapers; a monkey sculpted out of
lava; a torture pose once called “The Vietnam,” now called “The Statue of
Liberty;” twenty year-old Flynn splitting open cut straws found in his motherʼs
glove compartment, licking out cocaine residue; Flynn bending down to his wifeʼs
belly, two days after their daughterʼs due date, murmuring, “Weʼre waiting for you,
little one, the coast is clear.” In another meta-passage of the book, Flynn writes,
“Sometimes Iʼll say Iʼm writing a memoir of bewilderment, and just leave it at that,
but what I mean is the bewilderment of waking up, my hand on Inezʼs belly, as
the fine points of waterboarding are debated on public radio.”

I meet Flynn one evening in January at a cafe in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, where he
lives now, with Taylor and their nearly two year-old daughter. Known as more of
a brunch spot, the place feels like a B&B dining room or perfect grandmaʼs
country kitchen. I order a chicken pot pie. Flynn, who eats early these days with
his daughter, has a pot of tea. As Dionne Warwick sings, “I say a little prayer for
you,” through the speakers, I ask Flynn if he wants to talk about torture first or
fatherhood? In interviews for The Ticking is the Bomb, he tells me, some people
donʼt want to talk about torture at all; others only want to talk about it. “I give the
mornings to torture and the afternoons are for love,” he jokes. Early on in the
book, he writes, “Maybe talking about torture is easier than talking about my
impending fatherhood.” I take out the book to rifle through my notes, and Flynn
reaches for it, like a kid. He sings the praises of Kapo Ng, the artist who
designed the covers of both his memoirs. “You give him the book, and then like a
week later he comes back with the cover and nothing changes.”

As Flynn thumbs through the book, my notes on Proteus fall out. Flynn says he
“got” Proteus from Stanley Kunitz, calls the sea god “a poetʼs archetype.” He
worries, “You have to be careful of the archetypes you embrace. Our culture
embraces Prometheus, which is the same thing as Adam and Eve. He gets
punished for knowledge. I never quite understood why we are punished for
knowledge.” Both Prometheus and Proteus are symbolically present in one of my
favorite passages in The Ticking is the Bomb, “Lava.” Flynn writes of the months
following a volcanoʼs eruption, lava slowly moving towards a village: “Some
argued that it was better than a flood, better than a fire—lava gives you time to
move out what you most value. I had the idea that the only option would be to
uproot your house and put it on a raft and float it to the next island.” Proteus is a
distinctly Flynn archetype, even reflected by the loose form of his memoirs.

Growing up in Scituate, he tells me, “Everything was damp all the time. You could
smell the ocean.” His father claims that his grandfather invented the life raft.
Flynn once lived on a boat; in The Ticking is the Bomb he writes, “My twenties,
you could say, were water, you could say I was, in a way, more ocean than earth.
You could say that whatever was solid in me was slowly dissolving.” Where Flynn
lives now, in Brooklyn, he is still close to the water. In the mornings and
evenings, if the trafficʼs not too loud on a particular street, you can hear ship
horns as they pass through the harbor. At a recent reading, he shared a poem
called “Kedge,” (a method of anchoring a ship). Another poem, “haiku (failed)”
echoes Goodnight Moon but with a nautical edge, with the lines: “bye-bye/ boat,
bye-bye rain,” “beating, our bodies the bottle, a ship inside each,” and “here it is
still, your heart, is it well/ well welling?”
Flynn is indeed a mutable a character in The Ticking is the Bomb, split between
two women and briefly returning to substance abuse after years of sobriety. A
woman who refuses to have coffee with Flynn, because she is married, tells him,
“Two dogs live inside me, and the one I feed is the one that will grow.” He is
drawn into a relationship with a woman he calls Anna, who shares some of the
same dark impulses that run through his family. In the midst of severing ties with
her, Flynn admits, “When I was with her I felt known, perhaps for the first
time…Those rooms we shared became a space in which to reveal a darkness I
carried inside me, a heaviness that needed to be dragged into the light, or it
would sink me.”

Where Flynnʼs character shifts forms, his partner, Inez, is a solid force. If Flynnʼs
writing werenʼt such a kick in the pants, this could come across as the old “you
make me want to be a better man” shtick, but instead he gives us passages like
this:

When I turn away from the book, Inez is there, radiantly pregnant,
seemingly more sure of whatʼs to come, and this calms me. The
baby is, after all, inside her, inside her body—perhaps this makes it
more real, for her. But then, Inez has always been this way—
certain, or at least seemingly so. It confused me when we first got
together, for it seemed that whether I was to stay or go she would
be alright, that she would survive. When we were first together I
had to face the uncomfortable realization that I wasnʼt used to
calling love something that didnʼt involve disaster.

Flynn evokes Elizabeth Bishopʼs familiar words in “One Art”: “the art of losingʼs
not too hard to master/ though it may look like, (Write it!) like disaster.” As he
struggles to latch on, open up to a stable relationship, he makes new the poetsʼ
old favorite, loss.

On their first date, Flynn and Inez talk about having children. In a passage called,
“The Tricky Part,” he writes,

We werenʼt asking each other if we could imagine having children

with each other, but we werenʼt not asking that either. For years Iʼd
told myself that I could live anywhere, for a year or two…. Some
part of me did this with women as well… imagined a new woman as
a city I could stay in for a while, then visit from time to time. Iʼd know
my way around, I wouldnʼt need a map, but I wouldnʼt really live
there either. But a child? A child wasnʼt like a city, or even a
woman. I couldnʼt simply visit now and then.

Flynn navigates this murky water through his elegant language, trying not to
“blame the map [he was] given” for his apprehension. This is not a book of
blame, but one of understanding how images and words are manipulated, in
personal relationships or in a larger scope. After the Abu Ghraib photographs are
leaked, Flynn listens to the U.S. governmentʼs malevolent poets deny what the
photos show, twisting language to map their own agenda. Donald Rumsfeld
says he is “not going to address the torture word.” Flynn hears victims of torture
use words to describe how their bodies were manipulated; looking at photos of
himself, a man called Amir says, “I do not believe it was me that was there.”

Of the sonogram image of his daughter from 2007, Flynn writes, “I was there
when each shot was taken, yet in some ways, still, it is all deeply unreal.” Since
then, nursery rhyme language has crept into some of his recent poetry. He has
seen every sunrise for two years as he wakes with his daughter, a time he
considers meditation. “Iʼm preparing food for her, making tea, sitting and reading
a book to her. Itʼs not a sitting meditation, but the attention is there,” he says. In
the opening passage of The Ticking is the Bomb, Flynn writes that he hopes to
be able to explain the “dark time” of our country to his daughter as a story in the
past. “We got lost for a while, this story will begin, but then we found our way.”