The Tender Bar: A Memoir

J. R. Moehringer

Aug 2005 · Hyperion

About this ebook

The New York Times bestseller and one of the 100 Most Notable Books of 2005. In the tradition of This Boy's Life and The Liar's Club, a raucous, poignant, luminously written memoir about a boy striving to become a man, and his romance with a bar. J.R. Moehringer grew up captivated by a voice. It was the voice of his father, a New York City disc jockey who vanished before J.R. spoke his first word. Sitting on the stoop, pressing an ear to the radio, J.R. would strain to hear in that plummy baritone the secrets of masculinity and identity. Though J.R.'s mother was his world, his rock, he craved something more, something faintly and hauntingly audible only in The Voice. At eight years old, suddenly unable to find The Voice on the radio, J.R. turned in desperation to the bar on the corner, where he found a rousing chorus of new voices. The alphas along the bar--including J.R.'s Uncle Charlie, a Humphrey Bogart look-alike; Colt, a Yogi Bear sound-alike; and Joey D, a softhearted brawler--took J.R. to the beach, to ballgames, and ultimately into their circle. They taught J.R., tended him, and provided a kind of fathering-by-committee. Torn between the stirring example of his mother and the lurid romance of the bar, J.R. tried to forge a self somewhere in the center. But when it was time for J.R. to leave home, the bar became an increasingly seductive sanctuary, a place to return and regroup during his picaresque journeys. Time and again the bar offered shelter from failure, rejection, heartbreak--and eventually from reality. In the grand tradition of landmark memoirs, The Tender Bar is suspenseful, wrenching, and achingly funny. A classic American story of self-invention and escape, of the fierce love between a single mother and an only son, it's also a moving portrait of one boy's struggle to become a man, and an unforgettable depiction of how men remain, at heart, lost boys.

Ratings and reviews

I'm not a writer, but if I were I could maybe adequately describe why I liked this book so much. I had to force myself to put it down to go to sleep at night. For me, the people, places and happenings were real and alive. I'm so glad I got to experience this funny, witty and engaging journey from childhood to manhood.

I enjoyed this book; hard to believe it's a memoir but totally understandable why he had to tell his story. They characters are entertaining and sometimes sad. I was hoping that JR would tell us before the end of the book that he was happily married with a couple of children living in suburbia somewhere. Lots of lessons to be learned from this book and JR's life.

Good

About the author

J. R. Moehringer is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and novelist. He is the author of The Tender Bar (2005) and Sutton (2012). He collaborated on Andre Aggassi's memoir Open (2012). Moehringer graduated from Yale University in 1986. He began his journalism career as a news assistant at The New York Times later moving to Breckenridge, Colorado to work at the Rocky Mountain News and even later he became a reporter for the Orange County bureau of the Los Angeles Times. Moehringer eventually was sent to Atlanta to serve as the LA Times national correspondent on the south. Moehringer received the Literary Award, PEN Center USA West and the Livingston Award for Young Journalists, both in 1997 and a Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 2000.