The Tender Bar
A Memoir
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4.5 • 192 Ratings
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Now a major Amazon film directed by George Clooney and starring Ben Affleck, Tye Sheridan, Lily Rabe, and Christopher Lloyd, a raucous, poignant, luminously written memoir about a boy striving to become a man, and his romance with a bar, in the tradition of This Boy’s Life and The Liar’s Club—with a new Afterword.
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.
Named a best book of the year by The New York Times, Esquire, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, NPR's "Fresh Air," and New York Magazine
A New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, Booksense, and Library Journal Bestseller
Booksense Pick
Borders New Voices Finalist
Winner of the Books for a Better Life First Book Award
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Moehringer capably reads his own memoir, which takes him from a peripatetic Long Island childhood to life as a budding journalist at the New York Times. Torn between the feminine comfort of his mother and the masculine camaraderie he finds in a series of bars and taverns, Moehringer details his difficult but loving upbringing. Having lived the experiences of his book, Moehringer brings to life colorful characters, like his stuttering grandfather. His soft, deep voice complements the warmly rendered history that celebrates the oddly composed parts of his childhood, and how time spent in a series of bars carousing with father figures formed him. The uniform tone of the audiobook is hampered by the jazz noodling that appears at the beginning of each track, which interrupts the book's passage through time. Still, listening to Moehringer's soothing voice is like basking in the glow of a barroom storyteller not the one who shouts to be heard over the din, but the one whose story is good enough to make everyone keep it down. Simultaneous release with the Hyperion hardcover (Reviews, June 27).
Customer Reviews
Amazing
A roller coaster of emotions. A person I can relate with and hopefully change my outlook on “growing up”. The start of adulthood. Thank you JR.
Tender words
To JR:
As I read your memoir, flashbacks of pieces of my life emerged. Your story trapped me in memories of my past. Your Yale is my Northwestern.
As a writer of ads, I have learned to appreciate the writing skills of others. I can think of no one who I’ve enjoyed reading more than you. I am older than you, and I have written an unpublished novel just to satisfy an age long desire of mine. I’m working on a second. Just for me. Interestingly, I live in the same town where Jonathan Franzen went to high school, well within radio range of your cousin McGraw.
Don’t ever stop writing. I need your words and writing style to encourage me.
A panegyric to bars.
A panegyric to bars. “Do you mind if I say panegyric?”It has many great qualities but in the end, well up until the very end, in fact, past the end, until near the end of the epilogue, it is a long depressing tale cleverly told in the voice of a defeatist. Well written. I’ll give it that.