The Reenactments

Reviews

"Flynn's determination to better understand his life through the act of writing and remembering has yielded a truly insightful, original work." — Kirkus Reviews

"Eloquent, precise, intense and profoundly moving, The Reenactments is a powerful and beautiful story about grief, survival, and making art." — Dani Shapiro, author of Devotion

"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, author of Half a Life

"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, author of A Field Guide to Getting Lost

"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, author of [Sic]