Now a major Amazon film directed by George Clooney and starring Ben
Affleck, Tye Sheridan, Lily Rabe, and Christopher Lloyd, a raucous,
poignant, luminously written memoir about a boy striving to become a
man, and his romance with a bar, in the tradition of This Boy's Life
and The Liar's Club
J.R. Moehringer grew up captivated by a voice. It was the voice of his
father, a New York City disc jockey who vanished before J.R. spoke his
first word. Sitting on the stoop, pressing an ear to the radio, J.R.
would strain to hear in that plummy baritone the secrets of masculinity
and identity. Though J.R.'s mother was his world, his rock, he craved
something more, something faintly and hauntingly audible only in The
Voice.
At eight years old, suddenly unable to find The Voice on the radio, J.R.
turned in desperation to the bar on the corner, where he found a rousing
chorus of new voices. The alphas along 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 beach, to ballgames,
and ultimately into their circle. They taught J.R., tended him, and
provided a kind of fathering-by-committee. Torn between the stirring
example of his mother and the lurid romance of the bar, J.R. tried to
forge a self somewhere in the center. But when it was time for J.R. to
leave home, the bar became an increasingly seductive sanctuary, a place
to return and regroup during his picaresque journeys. Time and again the
bar offered shelter from failure, rejection, heartbreak--and eventually
from reality.
In the grand tradition of landmark memoirs, The Tender Bar is
suspenseful, wrenching, and achingly funny. A classic American story of
self-invention and escape, of the fierce love between a single mother
and an only son, it's also a moving portrait of one boy's struggle to
become a man, and an unforgettable depiction of how men remain, at
heart, lost boys.
Named a best book of the year by The New York Times, Esquire, The
Los Angeles Times Book Review, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today,
NPR's "Fresh Air," and New York Magazine
A New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, San
Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, Booksense, and Library Journal
Bestseller
Booksense Pick
Borders New Voices Finalist
Winner of the Books for a Better Life First Book Award
