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Book
Nick Flynn · 2004
A memoir by poet Nick Flynn recounting his relationship with his homeless father in Boston and Flynn's work at the Pine Street Inn shelter. The narrative explores homelessness, family estrangement, and the author's struggle to reconcile his life with his father's descent into poverty.
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What this book knows
A son working Boston's homeless shelter discovers his absent father sleeping there—estrangement, addiction, and ruin held in the same claustrophobic frame.
self-and-identity
If I let him inside I would become him, the line between us would blur, my own slow-motion car wreck would speed up.
ABNS-RC-006If you asked me about my father then I'd say, Dead, I'd say, Missing—I'd say whatever I felt like saying, and it would all be true.
ABNS-RC-004trauma-and-survival
The way he came to me first was as a letter from federal prison. Soon—very soon—he promised, I shall be known.
ABNS-RC-132How do you tell a homeless man that he cannot use the gift you have just given him?
ABNS-RC-084grief
For the days leading up to Christmas he works for the Salvation Army as a fake Santa, ringing a bell before a black pot.
ABNS-RC-155Offhandedly she says, That's your grandfather's funeral—the same coffee shop she worked in as a girl, where she met my father, though she never tells me this.
ABNS-RC-036Illuminates
6 published passages · book excerpt · research analysis
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