The Tender Bar: A Memoir

J.R. Moehringer grew up captivated by a voice. It was the voice of his father, a New York Metropolis disc jockey who vanished earlier than J.R. spoke his first phrase. Sitting on the stoop, urgent an ear to the radio, J.R. would pressure to listen to in that plummy baritone the secrets and techniques of masculinity and identification. Although J.R.’s mom was his world, his rock, he craved one thing extra, one thing faintly and hauntingly audible solely in The Voice.

At eight years outdated, immediately unable to seek out The Voice on the radio, J.R. turned in desperation to the bar on the nook, the place he discovered a rousing refrain of recent voices. The alphas alongside 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 seashore, to ballgames, and in the end into their circle. They taught J.R., tended him, and supplied a sort of fathering-by-committee. Torn between the stirring instance of his mom and the lurid romance of the bar, J.R. tried to forge a self someplace within the middle. However when it was time for J.R. to depart dwelling, the bar turned an more and more seductive sanctuary, a spot to return and regroup throughout his picaresque journeys. Again and again the bar supplied shelter from failure, rejection, heartbreak–and finally from actuality.

Within the grand custom of landmark memoirs,
The Tender Bar is suspenseful, wrenching, and achingly humorous. A traditional American story of self-invention and escape, of the fierce love between a single mom and an solely son, it is also a shifting portrait of 1 boy’s wrestle to change into a person, and an unforgettable depiction of how males stay, at coronary heart, misplaced boys.