Nick Flynn came to visit my memoir class at Eugene Lang on Tuesday, talking about his own remarkable memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and its relationship to his poetry.

His debut collection, 2000’s Some Ether covered some of the same bleak ground — his mother’s suicide, his homeless father, his own battles with drug and alcohol addiciton — and we had considered both the poems and the prose in class. Flynn, a remarkably chipper fellow (he had just rode his bicycle in from his new home in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn), said both grappled with the Buddhist idea that you’re the manifestation of both your parents — “that terrible thing.”

Writing Suck City (the title comes from an expression of his father’s) took him seven years and though the book changed form over that time, he knew at the beginning that he wanted the first word of it to be “please” and the last word to be “generous” — as it is. Given the absences in his life (his mother, who seemed to implicate her son’s writing in her suicide note, died when he was 16), Flynn found the memoir the right form to gauge all that loss. “In a memoir you’re not just writing about what happened,” he said, “you’re wrestling with what you don’t know.” The question he suggested students ask themselves (and sounds like good advice for any writer) is, “What is your intention in writing this?”

And how do you get rid of the self-pity, one student wanted to know? Clearly he had plenty of reasons to feel sorry for himself. His notebooks were full of self-pity he said (which he defined as that which doesn’t move toward compassion) but “it rose to the surface, like fat when you boil a chicken.” (They call that schmaltz, for the record.)

It is one thing to grapple with the realization that you are a manifestation of your parents and another to meet the limitations of that manifestation — the part where you begin. One of my students was curious about Flynn’s sojourn to Morocco, a druggy interlude that leads nowhere. Was he conscious or mirroring his father then, he wanted to know? (Dad had done his own Beat like wandering.) Flynn reminded him that the section ends with him concluding, “There is no bottom to getting lost.”

“Is it braver to get really lost?” he asked, framing it another way. “Or is it harder to be in the world sober?”