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Obsessed with the wrongs of Abu Ghraib, local author Nick Flynn traveled across the globe to meet its victims
In his powerful new memoir, The Ticking Is the Bomb (W.W. Norton), Scituate native Nick Flynn recounts a conversation he had with a man in Turkey.

WHAT MAKES NICK TICK? Flynn’s memoir, unflinchingly honest, takes a hard look at the dark and dangerous world.

In his powerful new memoir, The Ticking Is the Bomb (W.W. Norton), Scituate native Nick Flynn recounts a conversation he had with a man in Turkey.

My first child will be born in January, I told Amir. A girl. He narrowed his eyes and smiled, as if I had just come into focus.

You don’t realize it, but you know who “Amir” (not his real name) is. Or at least, almost certainly, you’ve seen a photograph of him. He’s the man — naked, cowering, his face a twisted mask of pain — being dragged on a leash across the concrete floor of Abu Ghraib prison by US Army Private Lynndie England. In the moments just before and after that photo was taken, his face was rubbed into a puddle of urine and he was sodomized with a broom.

Flynn met Amir in Istanbul, in 2007, interviewing him in a hotel room, alongside lawyers and human-rights workers. He was drawn there, despite the considerable travel expense — and the fact that his partner was pregnant with their first child — by a powerful, almost primal urge to meet and speak with the men abused at that infamous Iraqi jail.

The journey to Turkey, Flynn — who reads at Berklee’s Café 939 on Wednesday — tells the Phoenix, was “about my own wrestling . . . breaking down my own unacknowledged stereotypes.” And, he says of his interview, he was “surprised that I was surprised” to find that “sitting across from this man and hearing him talk in this way that was measured and reasonable, and even humorous at times” provided “much more of a human interaction than I’d anticipated.”

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Obsessed with the wrongs of Abu Ghraib, local author Nick Flynn traveled across the globe to meet its victims
In his powerful new memoir, The Ticking Is the Bomb (W.W. Norton), Scituate native Nick Flynn recounts a conversation he had with a man in Turkey.

WHAT MAKES NICK TICK? Flynn’s memoir, unflinchingly honest, takes a hard look at the dark and dangerous world.

In his powerful new memoir, The Ticking Is the Bomb (W.W. Norton), Scituate native Nick Flynn recounts a conversation he had with a man in Turkey.

My first child will be born in January, I told Amir. A girl. He narrowed his eyes and smiled, as if I had just come into focus.

You don't realize it, but you know who "Amir" (not his real name) is. Or at least, almost certainly, you've seen a photograph of him. He's the man — naked, cowering, his face a twisted mask of pain — being dragged on a leash across the concrete floor of Abu Ghraib prison by US Army Private Lynndie England. In the moments just before and after that photo was taken, his face was rubbed into a puddle of urine and he was sodomized with a broom.

Flynn met Amir in Istanbul, in 2007, interviewing him in a hotel room, alongside lawyers and human-rights workers. He was drawn there, despite the considerable travel expense — and the fact that his partner was pregnant with their first child — by a powerful, almost primal urge to meet and speak with the men abused at that infamous Iraqi jail.

The journey to Turkey, Flynn — who reads at Berklee's Café 939 on Wednesday — tells the Phoenix, was "about my own wrestling . . . breaking down my own unacknowledged stereotypes." And, he says of his interview, he was "surprised that I was surprised" to find that "sitting across from this man and hearing him talk in this way that was measured and reasonable, and even humorous at times" provided "much more of a human interaction than I'd anticipated."

Read more