Student slideshow for Mr. Stennett's Human Development class, Fall 2014

1. ANOTHER
BULLSHIT NIGHT
IN SUCK CITY
BY: NICK FLYNN

2. ABOUT NICK FLYNN
• Born January 26, 1960 (54)
• Was raised by his mother
• Recently married his wife Lili Taylor (2009)
• American author and playwright

3. • Another Bullshit Night in Suck City is a memoir of the life of Nick Flynn and his
father.
• Jonathan is the father who disappears in and out of Nicks life for about 20 years.
• Because he was a conman and alcoholic this lead Jonathan to live in homeless
shelters and not have a stable home.

4. NICKS MOTHER
Nicks mother left his father when he was 6 months old.
Nick had a young mother, when she left his father she
was 20 years old.
She was trying to raise nick and his two younger brothers.
Though her many boyfriends and one other marriage that
did not last they ended up in Scituate, Massachusetts.
Because of her issues eventually killing herself nick ended
up in Boston.

5. SCITUATE, MASSACHUSETTS
• The second most alcohol consuming town in the US.

6. • Nick became introduced to alcohol at the age at 12,
he started drinking beer
• At the age of 17 he started drinking to get drunk.
• During all this nicks mother was involved
and most of the time drinking and/or doing drugs with him.

7. “UNFORTUNATELY, WHEN IT COMES TO
ADDICTION, THE CONCEPT OF NATURE AND
NURTURE IS HARD TO UNTANGLE. THERE’S
COMPELLING EVIDENCE ON BOTH SIDES, AND
SOMETIMES, A PERSON MIGHT HAVE A RISK
FROM BOTH GENETIC FACTORS AND
ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS.”
- UNKNOWN AUTHOR-

9. • Later on in life nick and his father both ended up in Boston.
• Nick is 27 years old and is working as a caseworker within the Pine Street
Homeless Shelter.
• He runs into his father who had recently been evicted from his government
house.
• Throughout the end of the book over a 15 year span, nick and his father
reconnect and discover all the letters that his mom had wrote over the years
about his father.

10. To find out what happened after nick and his father reconnects he
wrote other books to explain their new relationship. The most
famous book telling about their relationship is called, Being Flynn.

11. ABSTRACT
Alcoholism Nature vs. Nurture
Nick Flynn's intensely personal memoir of his relationship with his father, Jonathan, an alcoholic con man
who physically disappears from Nick's life for the better part of twenty years, but never leaves his son's mind
completely. Constantly resurfacing in letters and stories, Nick is never lost of his father's reputation as a
criminal, deadbeat father, and town drunk who has burned nearly every bridge he has crossed.
Unlike his father, though, Nick is able to pull his life together. After years of transience, he settles in
Boston, taking a job at the Pine Street Inn, one of the nation's most active homeless shelters. Nick's details of
the nightly activities at Pine Street at times overpower the main narrative of the story as he describes night
after night of men as lost as his father drifting in and out of the Inn. Nick gets to know several of the men by
name, knows their stories, how they ended up there, and makes a type of personal connections with them
that he will never be able to make with his father. One could speculate that Nick is using these men to help
his father by proxy, and that may be right, but whatever the case may be, Nick's job certainly keeps his father
in his mind, waiting for the day when Jonathan will show up at Pine Street looking for a bed.
When Jonathan reappears in Nick's life, it causes him to have an intense personal crisis. Nick cannot
allow himself to treat his father different than any of the other men who show up nightly at Pine Street. As
Nick writes, "If asked directly, I'll say he's just another drunk, that's what I've always heard, a drunk and a con
man, he has nothing to do with me." Nick's disassociation is a defense, but a necessary one as he fears that
letting his father back into his life will ruin all of the things that he has achieved for himself: "If I went to the
drowning man the drowning man would pull me under. I couldn't be his life raft."

12. REFERENCES:
"Alcoholism Nature vs. Nurture | Dual Diagnosis." Dual
Diagnosis. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Nov. 2014.
"Being Flynn." IMDb. IMDb.com, n.d. Web. 17 Nov. 2014
http://www.simplypsychology.org/naturevsnurture.html