Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

the long version

"Nick Flynn met his father when he was twenty-seven years old, working as a caseworker in a homeless shelter in Boston. As a teenager he'd received letters from this stranger father, a self-proclaimed poet and con man doing time in federal prison for bank robbery. Nick, his own life precariously unsettled (his mother committed suicide when he was in his late teens), was living alternatively in a ramshackle boat and in a warehouse that was once a strip joint. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (a phrase Flynn senior uses to describe his life on the streets) tells the story of two lives, the story of Nick's boyhood in Scituate, Massachusetts, with his brother and young mother who struggled to keep the family together and the story of his larger-than-life father who refused to play by the rules, and the eerie trajectory that led Nick and his father into that homeless shelter, onto those streets, and finally to each other."--BOOK JACKET.