The Reenactments: A Memoir

by Nick Flynn

Overview

A literary tour de force about the making of a film and representation from a master of the memoir form.

For Nick Flynn, that game we all play—the who-would-play-you-in-the-movie-of-your-life game—has been resolved. The Reenactments chronicles the surreal experience of being on set during the making of the film Being Flynn, from his best-selling memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, and watching the central events of his life reenacted: his father's long run of homelessness and his mother's suicide. Flynn tells the story of Robert De Niro's first meeting with his real father in Boston and of watching Julianne Moore attempt to throw herself into the sea. The result is a mesmerizingly sharp-edged and kaleidoscopic literary tour de force as well as a compelling argument about consciousness, representation, and grief.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393344646
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	12/31/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Nick Flynn is the author of This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire and three previous memoirs, including the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award–winning Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, and four volumes of poetry. A professor on the creative writing faculty at the University of Houston, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Editorial Reviews

"Not only are films themselves composed of interiors and exteriors, but their creations are, as well. I've never read a book that has captured this fact so precisely, so movingly. The familiar hierarchies are reordered. Flynn has by now fashioned his own world of language, within which he can perform feat after revelatory feat."

Joshua Cody

"Some words we associate with good memoirs. ("Moving;" "brave.") And there are some—even with the best memoirs—we just don't. ("Intellectually challenging;" "formally adventurous.") Nick Flynn's The Reenactments is all these things, it is sui generis, it will make you cry. I read this book in a very short time. I won't stop thinking about it for a very long time."

Darin Strauss

"Eloquent, precise, intense and profoundly moving, The Reenactments is a powerful and beautiful story about grief, survival, and making art."

Dani Shapiro

"Maybe only poets should be allowed to write memoirs, because they know that our perception is partial, our recollection is worse, and the world is made of shards and fragments that make patterns, but leave gaps and sharp edges. Nick Flynn's excellent new memoir embraces the unknown and unknowable as the very core of our experience."

Rebecca Solnit

Flynn (The Ticking Is the Bomb, 2010, etc.) writes about having his memoir made into a movie. In Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (2004), Flynn told the story of reconnecting with his homeless and alcoholic father when the author was working at a Boston homeless shelter in the late 1980s, after Flynn's mother had committed suicide years earlier. That memoir became the basis for a movie, Being Flynn, filmed in 2011 and released this year, starring Robert De Niro and Julianne Moore as his parents. (Actor Paul Dano, of There Will Be Blood fame, portrayed Flynn himself.) This new memoir is told as a series of short, almost pointillist vignettes--most a page or less--creating a complex patchwork of thoughts and ruminations on memory. Flynn systematically tries to make sense of his roiling emotions as he cycles through episodes from his and his parents' lives. The inherent surreality of having your life portrayed by actors is a major theme. Describing a table reading of the film script, Flynn writes, "De Niro opens his mouth and my father comes out, then Dano opens his mouth and I come out, then Julianne opens her mouth." Several times, Flynn uses a quote from another writer--Joan Didion, Friedrich Nietzsche, Simone Weil and others--as a springboard to a new thought or to sharpen a previous one. He also analyzes other works of art, from glass flowers to a scene from The Godfather Part II to an obscure Samuel Beckett/Buster Keaton film. Flynn's determination to better understand his life through the act of writing and remembering has yielded a truly insightful, original work.

Kirkus Reviews