Biography
Nick Flynn was born in 1960 in Scituate, Massachusetts. Nick’s mother and father divorced when he was young, and his father, Jonathan Flynn, was not involved in much of his life (Nick Flynn Interview, identitytheory.com). That changed when Nick was a teenager and his father was in prison; Jonathan began writing his son letters.
When Nick was twenty-two, his mother committed suicide. After this, Nick worked a number of odd jobs before beginning work at a homeless shelter in Boston, Massachusetts. It was here, where he met his estranged father for the first time at the age of twenty-seven. Jonathan Flynn was homeless, an alcoholic, and had delusions of grandeur, fashioning himself as one of the greatest writers who ever lived. Nick wrote a memoir of his experience meeting and getting to know his father called Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, published in 2004. The book was later adapted into a movie called Being Flynn which stars Paul Dano as Nick Flynn and Robert De Niro as Jonathan Flynn(Nick Flynn, Poets.org).
But Flynn’s
writing career began in 2000 with the publication of his book of poems called Some Ether. The poems focus primarily on
his mother’s suicide, but some focus on his father. Some Ether launched Nick to the status of a successful poet; the
book won the PEN/Joyce Osterwell Award. In 2002, Nick published another book of
poems called Blind Huber. In addition
to Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, which
won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, Nick has published another memoir called The Ticking is the Bomb in 2010. Flynn
earned his MFA in creative writing from New York University and teaches at the
University of Houston in the spring. The rest of the year, he lives in Brooklyn,
New York. He is married to the actress Lili Taylor and they have a daughter
named Maeve. Nick’s next book, a memoir called The Reenactments will be released in 2013 and focuses on his
experience filming the movie Being Flynn (Nick Flynn, Poets.org).
