Brooklyn

Brooklyn is the borough where Richard Flynn was born and raised, and the place that shaped his early sense of class, diversity, and urban hardship. In his account, it is both a specific childhood geography—Williamsburg, near Grand Street—and a wider social world that he continued to carry with him after leaving for college and building an adult life elsewhere.

Childhood and social background

Flynn grew up in Williamsburg near Grand Street, where housing was much cheaper than it would become later. His mother taught history at Boys and Girls High School in Bed-Stuy, while his father worked as a medical assistant at Kings County Hospital. Flynn describes his family as not working class, but says that living in a blue-collar neighborhood made him feel as though he was. Their finances were not marked by major material hardship, though his parents could not afford many things the children wanted; his account holds those circumstances together rather than treating his childhood as either deprivation or ease.

The borough also provided Flynn with a formative experience of cultural variety. He recalls feeling at home among Brooklyn’s different races and customs, a contrast to his sense of social estrangement at Princeton. His memories of the 1970s place that diversity alongside difficult conditions: New York was enduring hard times, many people were very poor, and violence was widespread. Brooklyn’s importance in his recollection therefore lies not only in family origins, but in the environment through which he learned to understand social difference and insecurity.

A continuing point of return

Although Flynn attended Princeton, he tried to spend as little time on campus as possible and usually returned to New York on weekends. His movements connected Brooklyn to other parts of the city: he visited second-hand bookshops on the Upper East Side, attended plays in Chelsea, and went to concerts at the Knitting Factory on Houston Street. He also frequented cafes on Myrtle Avenue and crossed the bridge to the Lower East Side to dine with his parents and his younger brother, Eddie, at family-run restaurants. These routines show Brooklyn as the center of a broader urban life rather than an isolated childhood backdrop.

Flynn’s adult circumstances eventually placed him in Manhattan, where he lived near Chelsea for more than two decades and worked as a senior copywriter at an agency. Yet Brooklyn remained part of his family history and daily geography: his brother lived in Philadelphia, but the city continued to hold the places associated with his parents and youth. The account’s movement between neighborhoods makes departure from Brooklyn a change of residence, not a clean break from the world that formed him.

Books, memory, and the narrative

Brooklyn also frames the uneven return of Flynn’s literary past. After the murder of Joseph Wieder, Flynn was questioned by detectives and reporters; the attention contributed to his decision to leave Princeton and pursue a master’s degree at Cornell in Ithaca. Years later, he learned by chance that an issue of Signature containing his work had survived. A friend had found the magazine in a second-hand bookshop on Myrtle Avenue and gave it to him as a present, reconnecting an abandoned literary opportunity with a familiar Brooklyn location.

That small return gives the borough a role in the narrative beyond biography. Flynn’s story begins in a neighborhood that made him feel at home among differences, moves through the alienation he experienced at Princeton, and later circles back through a bookshop find to an earlier version of his writing life. Brooklyn is thus both the setting of his origins and a material link through which a lost part of his past unexpectedly reappears.