A dazzling, searing, and inventive memoir about becoming a father in the age of terror. In 2007, during the months before Nick Flynn’s daughter’s birth, his growing outrage and obsession with torture, exacerbated by the Abu Ghraib photographs, led him to Istanbul to meet some of the Iraqi men depicted in those photos. Haunted by a history of addiction, a relationship with his unsteady father, and a longing to connect with his mother who committed suicide, Flynn artfully interweaves in this memoir passages from his childhood, his relationships with women, and his growing obsession—a questioning of terror, torture, and the political crimes we can neither see nor understand in post-9/11 American life. The time bomb of the title becomes an unlikely metaphor and vehicle for exploring the fears and joys of becoming a father. Here is a memoir of profound self-discovery—of being lost and found, of painful family memories and losses, of the need to run from love, and of the ability to embrace it again.
Author
Nick Flynn is an American poet, memoirist, and playwright. His most famous book is a memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. He has published two collections of poetry: Blind Huber, and Some Ether, which won the inaugural PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Further honors include a 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2001 Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and the 1999 Discovery/The Nation Award for his poem, Bag of Mice, about his mother's suicide. Flynn earned an Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from New York University and teaches part-time at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program. He used to teach at Columbia University, where he was a poet and educator. He lives in New York and is married to the actress, Lili Taylor, with whom he has a daughter, Maeve. Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
