This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire
A Memoir
2 October 2020
Territory Rights — Worldwide including Canada, Singapore and Malaysia, but excluding the British Commonwealth.
Description
A searing memoir from critically acclaimed author Nick Flynn, on how childhood spills into parenthood.
When Nick Flynn was seven years old, his mother set fire to their house. The event loomed large in his imagination for years, but it’s only after having a child of his own that he understands why. He returns with his young daughter to the landscape of his youth, reflecting on how his feral childhood has him still in its reins, and forms his memories into lyrical bedtime stories populated by the both sinister and wounded Mister Mann.
With the spare lyricism and dark irony of his classic, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Flynn excavates the terrain of his traumatic upbringing and his mother’s suicide. This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire unravels the story of the fire that Flynn had to escape, and the ways in which, as an adult, he has carried that fire with him until it threatens to burn down his own house. Here Nick confronts his failings with fierce candor, even as they threaten to tear his family apart. His marriage in crisis, Flynn seeks answers from his therapist, who tells him he has “the ethics of a drowning man.”
This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire takes us on the journey of a man struggling to hold himself together in prose that is raw and moving, sharp-edged and wry. Alternating literary analysis and philosophy with intimate memoir, Flynn probes his deepest ethical dilemmas.
Reviews
"Nick Flynn writes like a wicked angel—heartbreaking and challenging yes, but with an undercurrent of comfort that comes from the fact that you can trust this voice. We need this book, now more than ever." — Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina
"Master of the lyric memoir, Nick Flynn has done it again. In This is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire, he weaves a hypnotic path through memory that is part nightmare, part fairy tale, part antihero’s journey, and tolling at every turn with the haunting voice of a past that refuses to stay gone…If all such sobering truths could be rendered with the beauty of his sentences, we might be better able to hold them." — Melissa Febos, author of Whip Smart and Abandon Me
"The enthralling performance of Nick Flynn’s prose (vast, lyrical, and philosophic) takes us once again to the smoldering haunts of human loneliness and the possibility of walking with sight. Against the backdrop of a marriage seeking firm ground and fatherhood that feels, at times, Sisyphean, such a transfiguring imagination as his allows us to realize memory curates language toward understanding and no aspect of the human journey is tangential; it’s full of miracles, grace, splendor, and fire." — Major Jackson, author of The Absurd Man
"This latest memoir in Nick Flynn’s remarkable body of work is at once tender and searing—suffused with longing, ruthless self-inquiry, intellectual rigor, and most of all, desire: desire to remember, to forget, to forge a family, to blow it all to smithereens. I read it on the edge of my seat." — Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance
Also By: Nick Flynn 
The Reenactments: A Memoir
Paperback, 2013
A literary tour de force about the making of a film and representation from a master of the memoir form.
The Reenactments: A Memoir
E Book, 2012
A literary tour de force about the making of a film and representation from a master of the memoir form.
Being Flynn
Movie Tie In Edition, Paperback, 2012
This "stunningly beautiful memoir" (San Francisco Chronicle) is now a major motion picture starring Robert De Niro and Paul Dano.
Being Flynn
Movie Tie In Edition, E Book, 2012
This "stunningly beautiful memoir" (San Francisco Chronicle) is now a major motion picture starring Robert De Niro and Paul Dano.
The Ticking Is the Bomb: A Memoir
Paperback, 2011
"A beautiful, intelligent book that renders pain both ordinary and extraordinary into art."—Susanna Sonnenberg, San Francisco Chronicle
