“Beginnings, I think of them as like holograms. If you cut any piece of a hologram, it contains all the information of the whole. And so I think the beginning of a piece should also contain all the information of the whole.”
That was the author Nick Flynn, speaking to my Memoir 2 class recently about Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. A student asked why he chose to open his book with a scene that some readers find off-putting:
(1989) Please, she whispers, how may I help you? The screen lights up with her voice. A room you enter, numbers you finger, heated, sterile almost. The phone beside her never rings, like a toy, like a prop. My father lifts the receiver in the night, speaks into it, asks Where’s the money? asks, Why can’t I sleep? asks, Who left me outside? The phone rings on a desk when he lifts it, the desk somewhere in Texas, someone is always supposed to be at that desk but no one ever is, not at night. A machine speaks while my father tries to speak, it doesn’t listen, it only speaks, my father’s face reflected dimly on the screen.
Suck City recounts what happened when Nick was working at a homeless shelter, and the father he’d only met once before in his life showed up as a client. His beginning does contain important pieces of the larger story — Nick’s father, his homelessness. It puts the reader into the nightly struggles of unhoused people, as it shows them trying to stay warm in an ATM vestibule.
But also, Nick said, it was representative of the larger story because some readers would find it off-putting.
“Yeah, there were sections I could’ve started with where you definitely would have had an easier time,” Nick said. “But then, I would have been selling you a false bill of goods because the rest of the book would confuse you anyway. So why not just confuse you right at the beginning so you know what you’re getting into?”
OK, he’s kidding there. But only kind of. Because the beginning is a bit disorienting, just like Nick’s father.
“You’re getting introduced to his character, not from my point of view, but from his point of view. You’re in his life, in his mind.”
But the author is not wholly absent from that beginning. Because it challenges the reader, which is how Nick likes to write a story.
“There’s a difference between passive art and active art, and for literature, I think you want to be actively engaged. I really wanted the scene at the beginning to feel like the reader is now complicit. Anyone who’s been in a city has gone into an ATM, and there’s been a homeless person there. And what is your experience of that? I just wanted the reader to have that experience, be part of it, and to consider the other side of it while you’re in it.”
Each of these aspects, they really do sound like they could drive readers away right? But they didn’t. When it came out, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City won a PEN Award, made the New York Times Bestsellers list for a hot minute, and has stayed in print for 20 years. In fact, Norton just released a new edition to mark the book’s 20th anniversary. What some might call off-putting are actually the story’s strengths.
OK writers, your turn: Open your work in progress, and look at your beginning. Does it, like a hologram, contain the information of the whole? Does it engage the reader the way you will engage the reader for the entire story? Is it as daring as you are?
Kelly Caldwell
Dean of Faculty
