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 The Ticking is the Bomb 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.
Nick Flynn grew up on in Scituate and attended New York University. He spent six years working at Pine Street Inn. He has published two books of poetry, Some Ether, Blind Huber, a how-to-teach poetry book, A Note Slipped Under the Door (with Shirley Phillips) a memoir, Another Bullshit Night In Suck City. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, The Nation, The Paris Review, NPR’s This American Life and The New York Time Book Review. He has also received a number of prestigious fellowships. He was a member of the Columbia University Writing Project, which trained teachers and taught writing to young people. He currently teaches one semester a year at University of Houston, and lives in upstate New York.