The Ticking Is the Bomb: A Memoir

Nick Flynn's THE TICKING IS THE BOMB is a memoir of sheer genius, heart and heartbreak so artfully juxtaposed that one deeply intensifies the other. I couldn't stop reading, couldn't turn away from the prism of torture, addiction, his mother's suicide, his conflicted relationships with women, illuminated from within by love--for the tortured, addicted, suicidal, and especially for Inez and the baby in her womb. The structure of the memoir is brilliant. The short sections allow us to take in the power of Flynn's consciousness and the beauty of his writing. We breathe in the spaces between, we exist in them.

I just finished this and - having read his other memoir and his poetry - I think it's his strongest work. He is an incredibly talented writer and brutally honest. His style of weaving together memories, observations, revelations is incredibly engaging and poignant. I can't recommend it enough.

I'm so thankful to have stumbled upon Nick Flynn, I feel as if I've discovered perfect literature. A master storyteller with the uncanny ability to connect memories, events and facts with serendipitous wit. His prose functions more like art, stroking the subconscious - leading you through both the light and shadows of his life. I'm still reeling from the range of emotions experienced over The Ticking is the Bomb. Both his memoirs are amazing. Amazing.

The Ticking Is The Bomb is a deceptively powerful memoir. It starts off being about love, family, falling for two women, and continues to be about that, while also delving deep into Flynn's past, especially his mother's suicide and his father's homelessness and their strained relationship. He starts out by musing: "For me, `dating' often felt like reading Tolstoy--exhilarating, but a struggle, at times, to keep the characters straight. The fact that the chaos had been distilled down to two women--one I'll call Anna, the other was Inez--felt, to me, like progress." He weaves all this, along with his partner pregnancy and later the birth of his daughter, in with his research into the United States government's use of torture, and what this means, to him, the U.S., and the world. There is a strong connection here to Stephen Elliott's The Adderall Diaries (Elliott makes a brief appearance here when he introduces Flynn to a dominatrix friend, Mistress Yin), in that both veer from the personal to the political and back in a way that could be disconcerting but isn't because it's so masterfully done, and because Flynn finds the connections between the two. What's beautiful about this book is that it isn't simply an indictment of torture, though it certainly is that, as Flynn details his experience listening to testimony from those who were photographed and tortured at Abu Ghraib, along with varying reactions to the publication of those photographs, but that each image, each word, each snapshot of a moment, gets layered upon what's come before and plants the seeds for what will come after. There's poetry to the way The Ticking Is The Bomb flows, a way that a simple word like "handshake" gets transformed into an act of betrayal, and Flynn returns to the images and themes he's introduced us to in often unsettling, but gripping ways. Oh, and the notes at the end are as powerful as any of the rest of the book, weaving in Janet Malcolm on the impact of suicide and some chilling thoughts on the likes of DOJ attorney John Yoo and others involved in the Bush Administration. Flynn works his way from zombie movies to drinking to lovers to travel to grammar to love and fatherhood. Though this is indeed a memoir, memory is questioned repeatedly, with Flynn making readers think through the same questions he ponders over the meaning of his mother's suicide note, over what a given photograph (or photo caption) actually means. The shortness of the chapters only serves, like the best short stories, to highlight their intensity, and, unlike standalone short stories, they merge to create a whole that's starkly honest in its complexity.