A book review from The Movie Snob:

The Tender Bar: A Memoir, by J.R. Moehringer (2005). I felt old reading this book. Since when did it become possible to pick up an autobiography that contains casual references to Tom Seaver, "Who shot J.R.?" and R2-D2? In other words, when did people my age (well, three years older) start publishing successful memoirs?

Anyhoo, it's a good read. The subtitle could easily have been A Memoir of Fatherlessness, because that is the defining (missing) feature of Moehringer's life. When he was an infant, his mother left his abusive father and took the baby with her. That meant a life of poverty, as she and he moved in with her parents (and her brother Charlie, and her sister Ruth, and Ruth's five kids) in a ramshackle house in the Long Island suburb of Manhasset. To make matters worse, Moehringer's father was a disc jockey in the New York area, so young Moehringer was addicted to listening to The Voice of the father who was otherwise not a part of his life at all. As he got a little older, he was more or less adopted by his Uncle Charlie, a bartender at a legendary Manhasset bar called Publicans, and his gang of barfly friends. The memoir takes the reader through Moehringer's first 25 years of life, and affectingly tells the story of the author's unending quest to overcome the insecurity that his upbringing instilled in him. There's also a short epilogue about the events of 9/11 and its impact on the Manhasset community. The book is strongly reminiscent of Angela's Ashes, but that was a good book, and so is this one. Well worth it.