Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No, and to bird.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm very happy to have with me poet, essayist, memoirist, Nick Flynn, whose most recent book, The Reenactments, reports the experience

of seeing a movie based upon his memoir, which was called, well, in ways that we can say it,

another BS night in Suck City, being turned into a movie starring Robert De Niro

and Paul Dano. And it's a rather extraordinary idea that goes behind this notebook journal

of the filming, that seeing seeing these events often scarring traumatic

horrific of his mother's suicide his father turning up in a homeless shelter that

seeing it reenacted by actors will be, in fact, a healing mechanism,

and that neuroscience thinks so too.

Tell me about this.

Hi, Michael. It's great to be here.

It's great to see you.

Yeah, that's something.

I didn't go into the filming or to being part of the film with that idea that it would be somehow healing.

It was something that sort of came about while I was on set and while I,

...