I read about this book in a menu.
No kidding.
There's a great sushi joint in town called Miya's that has a menu with facetious descriptions of food, stories on how dishes and drinks came to be, and even footnotes and an epilogue. Most fun menu I know- even better than the color-you-own ones.
And in this menu. _The Tender Bar_ was mentioned as "a short story" where the son of a single mother grows up in a bar using the men around him as the father figure (collectively) he doesn't have. This intrigued me and I saw the possibilty of a puppet piece coming from it, and so I marched my butt to Strand's the next time I was in the City and looked for a short story collection containing _The Tender Bar_.
Low, and behold, it was a 368-page hardback memoir, but it was on the sale table and I was on a mission, so it went home with me.
The book is not what I expected, not what I wanted, and so I hated it. But I could never really get up the steam I needed to really let that hatred set in because I was turning pages rapidly (for me, at least), chuckling and weeping (shh- don't tell).
Moeringer has such a clear remembrance of so many events, such clarity on what he felt and how to say it, even as a very young child, that I often wondered if I was reading the next LeRoy. But I didn't care too much, because I wanted to believe it and, ultimately, it didn't affect me one way or another if it was completely true, mostly true, or inspired by truth.
The book has unlovable, unlikeable characters who Moehringer manager to have me empathizing with even though their behavior is despicable. Fromt he outside, I saw that if this one character, Grandpa, had been different, that everything else, all the horrid things that happened and the terrible way people treated each other and their self-destructive behaviors could have been different, and probably better in some cases. ANd yet, I found myself saying, "Poor Fella" as I saw little acts of humanity in him.
It is not a nice, neat book.
It's a heartbreaker that goes on and on with little mendings and perpetual chipping away at J.R.'s heart- and mine. And then, it's about what happens after your heart breaks wide open and you're still alive.
The book is not always well-paced, and drags significantly in parts. I can't tell if that is the author trying to convey how his life was also dragging interminably at that time, or poor editing. And if you can stomach the heartache, it's surely a quick-ish read: no dense concepts, no giant vocab.
And despite the realtvely short time I spent reading it (under a week?), I sometimes find myself thinking about "that guy I knew, the one who hung out at the bar a lot and kept that kid out of trouble"-- and then I realize I am thinking about his very, very real portrayal of (presumably) real people he loves very much, and I kind of do, too. ( )

my favorite book of 2006 ( )

Autobio of a guy growing up poor in Manhasset, in the shadow of a famous bar. The first part of this book is terrific — beautifully written, evocative, touching, funny. Lots of interesting tidbits about Long Island too. Once JR, the protagonist, gets old enough to actually frequent the bar himself it became less interesting. Certainly the characters inhabiting the bar are fun and well-depicted, but none of them are as interesting as that of JR's mother, who is — sadly — largely absent from the second half of the book. In the end, it all felt a little shallow, as a seemingly-profound drunken conversation tends to be. ( )

One of the best memoirs I've ever read. Beautifully rendered. ( )

A memoir of a young man whose mother struggled to raise him alone after leaving his abusive father. In place of the man he never really knew, JR (it doesn't STAND FOR ANYTHING!) latched on to his Uncle Charlie and a motley assortment of bartenders and patrons at "The Bar", the neighborhood watering hole in his hometown of Manhasset on Long Island. Throughout his teenage years, these men took him under their collective and individual wings, took him to the beach, discussed books with him, gave him advice (of varying degrees of usefulness), encouraged him to dream of and eventually apply to Yale and made him feel he had a home beyond the bedlam of his grandparents' house, where he and his mother most often lived. Later, they supported him through failed love affairs, demoralizing attempts at novel-writing and dead-end jobs, taught him by example (mostly how to drink and survive hangovers), and gave him unconditional love. The story could be depressing as all get-out, but it's not. There is so much humor and tenderness in it--and after all, here is this supremely well-written memoir you're reading, as proof that it all turned out OK in the end. ( )