Take Three: Nick Flynn’s Triptych
ELIZABETH BOBRICK is a visiting scholar in the Department of Classical Studies at Wesleyan University, where she has also taught for the Department of English and the Wesleyan Center for Prison Education. Her publications range from scholarly articles to essays on an array of topics, from baseball to teaching Greek tragedy in a maximum-security facility.
THE MEMOIRIST IS simultaneously character and creator, actor and author, vulnerable yet intent on controlling the reader’s emotions. The author must speak and act convincingly as a character, and as narrator, they must step effortlessly out of frame and chronology to tell readers what the author claims to have understood only later.
When a memoir is adapted to a movie, however, as was Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, the narrator is no longer the author; he is only a character, and possibly no longer even the main character. His point of view is no longer the point of view, and what the audience sees is not in his control. He has to hit his marks on the story arc the screenwriter has drawn for him.
This is not to say that an adaptation always denatures a memoir. It helps if the original is a journey: point A to point B, with promising territory in view at the end. It’s more than fine if the map shows that here be monsters, too: people who hurt you, or want to; the death of loved ones, the loss of home; your own self-loathing, your inability to forgive yourself and others. Cheryl Strayed’s immensely popular memoir, , was a natural for the movies; it had all of the above, along with great scenery that
