BOOKS: The Tender Bar

"Emotionally powerful..."

The Tender Bar: A Memoir
by J.R. Moehringer
(Hyperion, 2005)

Trade Paperback, 370 pgs, $14.95 U.S.

A Notable Book of the Year:
The New York Times Book Review

Ohhhh, I thought I was falling in love, again, even though I've been happily married for almost 20 years...

The Tender Bar is a refreshing modern-day memoir, after last year's debacle of A Million Little Pieces. I strongly disliked that book, even before the author's fraud was outed, and I really disliked the author/main character, as a contemporary (of roughly the same age) writer. Ick.

But J.R. Moehringer...readers will fall in love with him as a young, fatherless boy in the 70s, searching not only for his place in the world, but for his male identity and role models. It is easy to fall for young J.R., for his introspection, for his ambition and vulnerability, for his concern for his mother and for his love of words...even just for his picture on the book cover (verified hottie).

The Tender Bar is ostensibly about growing up around the neighborhood bar and the characters who hang out there, but the treasure of this book is in getting to know J.R. Moehringer, who could perhaps prove to be our generation's F. Scott Fitzgerald -- a very talented, if tormented and at times self-limiting, writer. Moehringer's got the gift, as evidenced in The Tender Bar, and his Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism.

As often happens with love, through the course of The Tender Bar, I fell in and out of it, alternating with impatience and frustration, when J.R. achieves his and his mother's childhood dream of getting into Yale, on scholarship; manages to graduate while continually mooning about and obsessing over the elusive, one-dimensional, rich bitch Sidney (yes, I understand, apparently every guy has a Sidney)(Sidney was J.R.'s Daisy, in one of the many parallels and references to The Great Gatsby); and then squanders it all by crawling back to his grandfather's house in Manhasset, NY, and the bar, and a minimum wage job in the Home Fashions Department of Lord & Taylor. I thought I might have to leave him.

This cycle of incredible ambition and achievement, followed by self-doubt and failure, resulting in a return to the bar (literally or figuratively), is repeated several times in the book, in J.R. Moehringer's life, and in his development as a writer in the 90s.

Fortunately, by 9/11, Moehringer had matured and gotten it together enough to return to his hometown and participate in the grieving of a small community hard-hit by the tragedy: "Nearly fifty people from Manhasset died in the attacks on the World Trade Center..."

"Manhasset, where I'd once felt like the only boy without a father, was now a town full of fatherless children."

In an emotionally powerful Epilogue, Moehringer comes to a new understanding of and appreciation for the bar and his adult male role models, including his own father, who appears and disappears sporadically through J.R.'s life, until J.R. hears of his death shortly after 9/11. In finally growing up and letting go of the past, Moehringer was able to come to terms with the legacy of his difficult childhood and move forward in his life and career. Well done!