This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire

Starred review from May 18, 2020
In this outstanding work, poet and playwright Flynn bookends his first memoir, 2004’s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, with this unsparing look at his early childhood and his mother, who died by suicide when Flynn was 22 years old. He makes a series of visits to his hometown of Scituate, Mass., with his young daughter and describes his solitary childhood spent living with his mother in a small, “ugly” house that she bought after she left Flynn’s father. When Flynn was seven years old, his mother set fire to the house, an event he is still trying to understand: “Maybe my mother set our house on fire not merely to collect the insurance money, but simply to see what it was that she was losing.” His return trips are not only a chance to tell his daughter “where your father came from” but also to deal with his own unhappiness that led him to cheat on his wife. He comes to a realization that “we are so lost inside ourselves sometimes that it is impossible to think of other people, even those we love.” Readers will devour this powerful memoir of letting go.

June 1, 2020
Fire taught me everything, writes poet Flynn in his fourth searing memoir as he rakes the hot coals of his past in search of the sources of his family's dark afflictions. His rarely seen father has been his primary focus, most recently in The Reenactments (2013); here Flynn casts light on his feral' childhood with his young, beautiful, depressed mother in a coastal Massachusetts town where she worked two jobs and became entangled with untrustworthy men. One night she set their house on fire while Flynn slept, igniting a conflagration that rages within him still. Flynn's psychologically intricate recollections of boyhood mischief, including spying on a mysterious neighbor; and his mother's travails and suicide cast a fairy-tale spell. The past flares and smokes as Flynn struggles to save his imperiled marriage and to be a good father to his daughter as she reaches seven, the age he was when his house went up in flames. With evocative allusions to science, myth, literature, and film; hallucinatory descriptions, and walking-on-broken-glass intensity, this is a blazing work of confession, grief, wonder, and hope.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

June 1, 2020

Flynn (Another Bullshit Night in Suck City) once again revisits his childhood to probe the house fire he survived at the age of seven. He later learned, after seeking out one of his mother's old boyfriends, that she deliberately started the blaze in their asbestos-filled house to collect insurance money. His mother, Jody Draper, died by suicide when Flynn was 22, and she remains a mercurial figure for both readers and, seemingly, the author. He is searching for the connections between his traumatic childhood and his present-day unease, which include extricating himself from a years-long affair he began shortly after he married his wife, the actress Lili Taylor. One longs for Taylor's perspective, but she is treated here, as with Jody and Flynn's nameless lover, like a background prop. His most significant relationship appears to be the one he shares with his daughter; their bedtime stories and musings are interspersed throughout, frequently centering on a phantom-like figure from Flynn's childhood named Mr. Mann. VERDICT There is clearly a lot to mine from Flynn's youth, but this memoir is both disjointed and illusory, featuring imagined monologs from Flynn's mother to engage audiences further. Best for die-hard fans of Flynn's first memoir. [See Prepub Alert, 1/29/20.]--Barrie Olmstead, Lewiston P.L., ID

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2020

In both poetry (including the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award-winning Some Ether) and memoir (including the acclaimed Another Bullshit Night in Suck City), Flynn has explored his painful upbringing. This memoir focuses on his mother's setting the family house on fire and committing suicide and the consequences for his own role as a husband and parent. (A poem about a house fire in the recent I Will Destroy You reminds us that the smoke of the past never really dissipates: "what you can't hear is the leaves caught inside each spark.") With an eight-city tour.

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from July 15, 2020
A new memoir from Flynn, showing a writer who refuses to be bound by the conventions of form. Much like his previous work, Flynn's latest is a collage that mixes narrative, reflection, literary and film criticism, fiction, fantasy, and ruthless self-interrogation. That it works should surprise no one familiar with the author; he has an uncommonly nuanced voice and sensibility, and he holds little back. Flynn begins with his young daughter and a story he has told her "about a man who lived in the woods behind my grandmother's house." He quickly admits, "obviously there's a lot I leave out of the stories I tell my daughter." Here, that includes his own marital infidelity, the story of which comes framed (emotionally, at any rate) by a set of revelations about his mother, who burned down the family house when Flynn was 6 years old. The fallout of that event runs throughout like a vein of ore, casting everything that follows in its dancing light. "John Cassavetes once proposed," writes the author, "that when a character can't find his way home, that's where the story begins." Certainly, that's the case here. Unraveling his past in a series of short prose fragments, jumping around in time, Flynn excavates his history from an angle, as if he can't bear to look at it head-on. Yet, as the book progresses, the author reveals nearly everything, from his mother's suicide to the slow build of his affair with a woman who lived 1,500 miles away. For Flynn, there is a line connecting these events, an attempt to exert some sort of chaotic control. "Maybe my mother set the fire to find that sense of control as well," he writes about their shared sense of complicity. Memoir is a genre of complicity, a form that thrives on questions and filling in the gaps, especially when information is conjectural or scant. Flynn plunges headlong into such a territory, endowing his book with a palpable sense of risk. A remarkable and daring work, a song of both family and self.

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