Banango Lit

The trailer for Being Flynn is now on Youtube. Being Flynn is based on Nick Flynn’s 2004 memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, which is probably one of my favorite books. In the book, we see a vignette-style journey through Nick Flynn’s past, taking the reader from Nick’s childhood to Nick meeting his homeless father at a Boston-area shelter that Nick worked at.

The way the book is written resembles memory in a lot of ways, with the vignette style keeping the reader from being stuck in one spot for long, in the same way that human memory likes to move around as well.

This is one of the reasons, I think, that I find the book so effective. As a reader, I feel like I am inside Nick Flynn’s head.

Film is a limited medium, lacking the ability to seemlessly flashback as fiction does. We know this. We live with this. For the most part, we are okay with it, since fiction tends to, for the most part, be a linear form with a clear narrative. Memoir, though, is another thing. Memoir pieces, whether fictional or non-fictional, tend to involve a great deal more ‘revision,’ more of the apparentness of there being a ‘writer’. In Another Bullshit Night, Nick Flynn, the poet, is apparent in the text. It is clearly something being written, and this is a big part of the effectiveness of the book.

Can this be pulled off in Being Flynn? I am skeptical. I hope it works.