Tender Bar

Author(s): J.R. Moehringer

Biography & Memoir

JR Moehringer grew up listening for a voice, the voice of his missing father, a disc jockey who disappeared before JR spoke his first words. As a boy, JR would press his ear to a battered clock radio, straining to hear in that resonant voice the secrets of identity and masculinity. When the voice disappeared, JR found new voices in the bar on the corner. A grand old New York saloon, the bar was a sanctuary for all sorts of men - cops and poets, actors and lawyers, gamblers and stumblebums. The flamboyant characters along the bar taught JR, tended him, and provided a kind of fatherhood by committee. Torn between his love for his mother and the lure of the bar, JR forged a boyhood somewhere in the middle. When the time came to leave home, the bar became a way station - from JR's entrance to Yale, where he floundered as a scholarship student; to Lord & Taylor, where he spent a humbling stint peddling housewares; to the "New York Times", where he became a faulty cog in a vast machine. The bar offered shelter from failure, from rejection, and eventually from reality, until at last the bar turned JR away.In the rich tradition of bestselling memoirs about self-invention, "The Tender Bar" is by turns riveting, moving, and achingly funny. An evocative portrait of one boy's struggle to become a man, it's also a touching depiction of how some men remain lost boys.


Product Information

General Fields

  • : 9780340828830
  • : Hodder & Stoughton
  • : Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
  • : 0.27
  • : September 2006
  • : 2.5 Centimeters X 13 Centimeters X 19.9 Centimeters
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : J.R. Moehringer
  • : 384
  • : 070.92
  • : English
  • : 1
  • : Paperback