The Reenactments: A Memoir

I loved Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir so when I found out that he subsequently wrote two additional memoirs, I knew that I wanted to read them as soon as possible and one right after the other. So after I finished reading Flynn’s second memoir, The Ticking Is the Bomb: A Memoir, I immediately read The Reenactments: A Memoir even though I was not as enamored with the second as I was with the first.
The Reenactments: A Memoir is about Flynn’s experience of making the film, Being Flynn, which is based on his first memoir. I feel like I need to brush up on my Umberto Eco and philosophy to suck the marrow out of this book, but that is not going to happen. The Reenactments: A Memoir addresses the nature of memory, our compulsion to recreate reality, including for therapeutic purposes, and questions at what point does the recreation substitute and eliminate reality or the surreal nature of when the representation intersects with the reality, specifically when Flynn’s wife, Lili Taylor, touches Paul Dano as Flynn in the movie, and how that gesture had far deeper resonance and hope for Flynn than the viewers.
The Reenactments: A Memoir is beautiful, but like the second memoir, far more rooted in a specific time period and less universal than the first memoir and thus less memorable. I really enjoyed getting the perspective of movie-making from the uncinematic source material, the person who loved it, but is also conscious of the artificial nature of what he originally created.