Overview

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.

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9780393338867

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Reviews

Reading this book is like experiencing a very skilled surgeon performing an operation on his own insecurities and new found fragile maturity. The written operation may be painful but watching the scars heal on the page is a true delight. -- John Waters, director and author

[Flynn's] efforts to reconcile the tattered pieces of his life--his determination to find love and redemption in a world gone mad--feel gutsy, hard won, and utterly true.

[Flynn's] efforts to reconcile the tattered pieces of his life his determination to find love and redemption in a world gone mad feel gutsy, hard won, and utterly true.

Author Information

Nick Flynn is the author of This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire and three previous memoirs and six volumes of poetry. A professor on the creative writing faculty at the University of Houston, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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