NOW A MAJOR FILM DIRECTED BY GEORGE CLOONEY AND STARRING BEN AFFLECK 'Highly entertaining . . .
constructed as skilfully as a drink mixed by the author's Uncle Charlie' New York Times
'Moehringer writes with a survivor's wisdom . . . The Tender Bar is a memoir but has the
texture of a novel' Sunday Telegraph 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. JR Moehringer grew up listening for a voice the voice of his missing father
a DJ 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. 'A wonderful book . . . everyone in it is incredibly alive everyone shines and every
vice is transformed into something glorious' James Salter J.R. Moehringer winner of the
Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 2000 is a former national correspondent for the Los
Angeles Times and a former Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. Moehringer is the author of the
memoir The Tender Bar and the bestselling novel Sutton and co-author of Open by Andre Agassi
Shoedog by Phil Knight and Spare by Prince Harry.
