Book Impressions – “The Tender Bar” by J.R. Moehringer

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This was not a book that I would have picked on my own. Somebody mentioned to me in a comment that it was a book that I might enjoy, so I ordered it from Amazon the next time I placed an order. (Every once in awhile, I need something fairly small to get to the $35 free shipping minimum, so I usually have a couple of things saved to the side that I can throw in if I need to. I *suspect* this was the case here.) The book had been sitting atop the 2-foot-high pile of “things to read next” on the table by one of the living room recliners, and it had been there long enough that I had kind of forgotten about it.

However, being at the top, a couple of weeks ago I picked it up and started looking through it, and the writing absolutely captivated me. I formally started from the beginning, and before I knew it, I was over a hundred pages in. It’s really that good. I made it to the end. You hear me? I made it to the end!!

The Tender Bar is a memoir, a tale of J.R. Moehringer’s life as he grew up and negotiated the world as a son without a father. Obviously, he did have a father, but the man was not a good man and wasn’t in the picture. He grew up with his mother constantly struggling to make ends meet, and trying to live up to the self-imposed expectation that he take care of her. One constant in his life was the neighborhood bar where his uncle – the brother to his mom – worked, and the men who gave him a place to be as he was trying to figure out this crazy thing called life.

There were several things I liked about this book. I think I have a tendency to like memoirs, but I also realize that it’s really easy to do a memoir wrong. One tendency that a lot of people have is to make themselves the superhero in the story, to the point where they are never wrong. (Though not a memoir, my mom pointed out this style of storytelling from the TV show Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. As much as she liked the show, we all knew that Michaela was never wrong, which did get to be comical, but I digress…) From the time he’s a kid, Moeringer writes the story in a way in which his actions are sometimes comical, sometimes even inexplicable, but always somehow understandable for the situation he’s in. I think he does a good job demonstrating how having two radically different “pictures” of the future really affected his behavior – on one hand, he’s a kid whose mother is barely getting by and he kind of assumes that life is this struggle against being devoured by greater forces; a life where he can hardly comprehend a world where a person is doing more than getting by. At the same time, he’s a kid who is incredibly bright whose mother cares enough to push him to make the most of his talents. Surprising even to him, he manages to get himself accepted to Yale. As time passes, it becomes more and more obvious that he can’t avoid choosing who he’s going to be – the young man wanting to set the world on fire as a writer for the New York Times or a common barfly whose only stories are of how he was *this close* to success.

Considering the book, and considering that this book was even adapted into a movie by Amazon (though I’ve gathered that it changes a fair number of things) it’s probably obvious what Moehringer’s choice ended up being. Moehringer is an incredibly talented writer who manages to draw a reader in to every page. There are all kinds of “colorful” characters, from family to bar patrons to bookstore bosses who don’t seem interested in actually selling books, but he also seems to have the rare understanding that places can be characters in and of themselves, and Manhasset, New York, where he spent most of his childhood, is one of those places, and the bar where his uncle worked served as an organ for the lifeblood of the community.

As you might imagine, there’s some adult language as well as rough men talk. I’m not saying that to disparage the book, because it absolutely fits the situation it’s written in, but I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. It is an amazing story, so very “American” in the sense of the kind of story where a young person rises up against all odds to make something of his life, but it doesn’t gloss over the loss and pain that had to be worked through and put away in order to even decide to go down that path.