Life Stories #24: Nick Flynn

photo: Matthieu Bourgeois

In this episode of Life Stories, my podcast series of interviews with memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, I talk to Nick Flynn about his latest memoir, The Reenactments, which describes (among other things) what it was like to be on the set as his first memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, was turned into the motion picture Being Flynn. (And, of course, we talk about knowing that he was never going to get to keep the original title once the movie got seriously underway…)

The Reenactments also reflects Flynn’s deep interest in the neuroscience of memory, with insights drawn from Antonio Damasio, Vilayanur Ramachandran, David Eagleman, and others. And we talk a bit about the glass flower exhibit at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, which Flynn visited as a child and continues to move him as a metaphor for how we try to retain our pasts and carry them over into the present.

Listen to Life Stories #24: Nick Flynn (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).

28 February 2013 | life stories |