• Being Flynn

  • A Memoir
  • By: Nick Flynn
  • Narrated by: Scott Brick
  • Length: 7 hrs and 44 mins
  • 3.9 out of 5 stars (63 ratings)

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Being Flynn  By  cover art

Being Flynn

By: Nick Flynn
Narrated by: Scott Brick
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Publisher's summary

“Sometimes I’d see my father, walking past my building on his way to another nowhere. I could have given him a key, offered a piece of my floor. But if I let him inside the line between us would blur, my own slow-motion car wreck would speed up.”

With a raw authenticity stripped of self-pity and a powerful narrative voice unlike any other, Being Flynn illuminates the hidden story of fathers and sons in America. Nick Flynn has written a remarkable testament to the enduring strength of one boy’s struggle for survival.

Nick met his father when he was working as a caseworker in a homeless shelter in Boston. As a teenager, he’d received letters from this stranger, a self-proclaimed poet and con man doing time in federal prison for bank robbery. Being Flynn tells the story of the trajectory that led Nick and his father onto the streets, into that shelter, and finally, to each other.

©2004 Nick Flynn (P)2010 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Critic reviews

“What a piece of work…eloquent, funny, unsentimental, and bravely inventive.” (Dennis Lehane, New York Times bestselling author of Mystic River and Shutter Island)
“Nick Flynn’s devastating memoir does what only significant works of art can do—it shows us a world we know, but fail to see or understand. No one who reads [ Being Flynn] will ever walk through a city in the same way again. If I say that Flynn’s book ranks with Frank Conroy’s Stop-Time, I mean it as the highest possible praise.” (Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hours)
“A stunningly beautiful new memoir…A near-perfect work of literature.” ( San Francisco Chronicle)

What listeners say about Being Flynn

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  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

Trash

No redemptive value. Nothing to learn, just choppy, vular writing.
Scott Brick does his normal narration, over emphasizing every sentence!!

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2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars

Didn't finish.

This is a nicely written memoir that I think is hampered by the overly emotive reading. Should have read book.

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    1 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

As interesting as watching goldfish in a tiny aquarium for 7 hrs

This really isn’t going anywhere. The rating seems high, not sure how that happened because all reviews are 1 star… What is happening here Audible?

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