This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire: A Memoir

Written by Nick Flynn

Narrated by Charles Constant

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Highbridge Company
• Release date: Aug 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781696600330

Nick Flynn

Nick Flynn is the author of three acclaimed books of poetry, The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands, Blind Huber, and Some Ether, winner of the PEN/Osterweil Award. He is also the author of three memoirs, The Reenactments, The Ticking Is the Bomb, and Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, winner of the PEN/Martha Albrand Award. He is also the author of a play, Alice Invents a Little Game and Alice Always Wins (2008). He has received fellowships from, among other organizations, The Guggenheim Foundation and The Library of Congress. Some of the venues his poems, essays, and nonfiction have appeared in include the New Yorker, the Paris Review, National Public Radio’s This American Life, and the New York Times Book Review. His film credits include artistic collaborator and “field poet” on the film Darwin’s Nightmare (nominated for an Academy Award for best feature documentary in 2006), as well as executive producer and artistic collaborator on Being Flynn, the film version of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. A professor in the creative writing program at the University of Houston, where he teaches each spring, he then spends the rest of the year in (or near) Brooklyn.