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Another Bullshit Night in Suck City is Nick Flynn's intensely personal memoir of his relationship with his father, Jonathan, an alcoholic con man who physically disappears from Nick's life for the better part of twenty years, but never leaves his son's mind completely. Constantly resurfacing in letters and stories, Nick is never lost of his father's reputation as a criminal, deadbeat father, and town drunk who has burned nearly every bridge he has crossed.

Flynn structures the narrative by paralleling his father's story with his own. Appropriate as he has a fear of ending up like his father, and for a good part of his youth, looks to be headed down that path. Nick describes his own teenage years in much the same way he describes the adult years of his father: lost, drowned in alcohol, and heading nowhere. "I see no end to being lost," writes Nick, "You can spend your entire life simply falling in that direction. It isn't a station you reach but just the general state of going down."

Unlike his father, though, Nick is able to pull his life together. After years of transience, he settles in Boston, taking a job at the Pine Street Inn, one of the nation's most active homeless shelters. Nick's details of the nightly activities at Pine Street at times overpower the main narrative of the story as he describes night after night of men as lost as his father drifting in and out of the Inn. Nick gets to know several of the men by name, knows their stories, how they ended up there, and makes a type of personal connections with them that he will never be able to make with his father.

One could speculate that Nick is using these men to help his father by proxy, and that may be right, but whatever the case may be, Nick's job certainly keeps his father in his mind, waiting for the day when Jonathan will show up at Pine Street looking for a bed.

Suck City, whose title comes from Jonathan's nickname for his hometown of Scituate, Massachussets, flows seamlessly between Nick and Jonathan's stories, with Nick recalling the major events of his youth, and how they were effected by his father's absence, and also recreating Jonathan's path after he becomes separated from his family. In describing Jonathan, Nick is disconnected but sympathetic, particularly when describing Jonathan's unfulfilled dreams of writing the Great American Novel. He understands his father, not only because he is a writer himself, but also because he has met so many other men like Jonathan at Pine Street, men for whom a combination of bad luck, broken dreams, and selfish choices have led to that general state of going down. While Nick can spend his days caring for these men, some of whom have certainly done things as bad, or much worse, than his father, he cannot forgive Jonathan for what he has done.

Ultimately, Flynn's book is a cathartic exercise in rousting out these demons left by his father. When Jonathan reappears in Nick's life, it causes him to have an intense personal crisis. Nick cannot allow himself to treat his father different than any of the other men who show up nightly at Pine Street. As Nick writes, "If asked directly, I'll say he's just another drunk, that's what I've always heard, a drunk and a con man, he has nothing to do with me." Nick's disassociation is a defense, but a necessary one as he fears that letting his father back into his life will ruin all of the things that he has achieved for himself: "If I went to the drowning man the drowning man would pull me under. I couldn't be his life raft."

In an age of memoirs, Flynn's stands out as one of the most touching I've read. His intense personal anguish seeps through the pages, without ever being a ploy for pity. He never asks the reader to feel sorry for him, or Jonathan for that matter, just to understand the situation and, if possible, imagine what it would be like to be in his position. If we were, we'd all surely understand the conflict that he faces. Few of us, however, would be able to write such a lucid account as Flynn has with Suck City.