This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire

A searing memoir from critically acclaimed author Nick Flynn, on how childhood spills into parenthood.

When Nick Flynn was a child, his mother set fire to their home. With the spare lyricism and dark irony of his classic, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Flynn excavates the terrain of his traumatic upbringing and his mother’s suicide. Now a parent himself, he discovers that he too may be burning his house down. He returns with his young daughter to the landscape of his youth, reflecting on how his “feral childhood” has him still in its reins.

This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire confronts Flynn’s struggle and his failings—including a five- year affair, begun when his daughter was a toddler—with fierce candor. His marriage in crisis, Flynn seeks answers from his therapist, who tells him: “You have the ethics of a drowning man.” 

Alternating literary analysis and philosophy with intimate memoir and the bedtime stories he tells his daughter, Flynn probes his deepest ethical dilemmas. 

About the Author: Nick Flynn is the author of three previous memoirs, including the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award-winning Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, and four volumes of poetry. A professor on the creative writing faculty at the University of Houston, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.