About the Book

With Stay, acclaimed poet, artist, and bestselling memoirist Nick Flynn presents a self-portrait via a constellation of topics that have circled his work. Ranging from the impact of suicide and homelessness to addiction, political engagement, and the vital power of artistic friendships, Stay is a mixed-media retrospective that shows nothing is created in isolation.

Mirroring Flynn’s life, this work of visual and literary memoir is populated by examples of his collaborations since the 1980s with such luminaries as the photographers Amy Arbus and Catherine Opie, composer Guy Barash, actor Robert De Niro, cartoonist Josh Neufeld, author Sarah Sentilles, filmmaker Paul Weitz, and artists John Baldessari, Marilyn Minter, and Bill Shuck. In Flynn’s refusal to conform to narrative or the safety of his own perspective, Stay grasps for an essential truth, an answer to what art, in the end, can and cannot reflect.

Praise for Stay

“Personally, this book came to me when I needed it and detangled some of the loose threads balled up in my mind. This book is a self-portrait, a collaboration, and a piece of art. This book is essential."

—Ali Hintz, The Arkansas International

“Stay may be our best glimpse yet into the remarkable mind of Nick Flynn. His is part polymath's mind teeming with sights and insights; part scrap-booker’s mind preserving and arranging memory; his is first and foremost a poet's mind animated by feeling and song. Playful and pensive, lucid and strange, Stay is a compendium of energies and intimacies. Flynn’s inventiveness is as tireless as his heart.”

—Terrance Hayes

“Stay [is] a kaleidoscopic self-portrait that combines Massachusetts native Flynn’s writing, photography, and collage with visual art from dozens of collaborators and influences and friends."

—Kate Tuttle, The Boston Globe

“In Stay [Flynn] writes about the friends who inspired him in the years leading up to his 2004 memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, adapted for the screen as Being Flynn, which starred Juliannne Moore, Robert DeNiro, and Paul Dano. Over 13 books, he has delved into topics like trauma, adultery, homelessness, love, loss, and addiction, with a characteristic self-reflection… Stay feels like the glue that brings them all together.”

—Licia Morelli, Vanity Fair

“Flynn illuminates the texts with his own found collages and artistic collaborations he has engaged in over his career. And everything included touches on the themes constant in Flynn’s work: the impact of his mother’s suicide, homelessness, addiction, politics, and the importance of connection. One of the pleasures of a book like Stay is its ability (rather, its capacity) to surprise… Stay is not a book meant for interpretation or analysis. It’s a book whose ability to make readers/viewers/listeners uncomfortable will change from page to page; the moments of discomfort will differ from reader to reader. That’s the beautiful thing about a book like Stay: the juxtaposition, the play between art forms, and how it allows room for experience, opens up space to sit and feel.

—Brock Kingsley, Chicago Review of Books

“If Nick Flynn’s Stay is a self-portrait, it is a self-portrait of our planet, of our contemporary consciousness in an undeniably wounded era. I think of it as an artist’s notebook, a prayer book, a monumental compendium of what it means to stay alive.” 

—Mary Ruefle

“[A] powerful retrospective.”

—Dave Simpson, The Guardian

“Chance, serendipity, and inquisitiveness mark Flynn and his poetry, nonfiction, and collaborations with writers, musicians, filmmakers, and visual artists. The wild success of his memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, later adapted into a film starring Robert DeNiro as his father, has not altered his curiosity and intensity. His latest project, Stay, just out from Ze Books, compiles ‘threads, conversations, and collaborations,’ and chronicles his many collaborations, including with Amy Arbus, Marilyn Minter, and John Baldessari.”

—Rob Spillman, Pioneer Works

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