Paula Marcotte, an on-line reader of The Citizen, recommended the book “The Tender Bar” by J.R. Moehringer. Since this is a memoir, I thought it might be a good book to listen to on my iPod. The audiobook version is read by the author, so the listener would get a real sense of what the author was going through as he narrated his life story.

“The Tender Bar” tells the story of young J.R. Moehringer, the son of a single mother. J.R. and his mom lived with her parents in a ramshackle house in Manhasset, a suburb of New York City in the 1970s. Also living in the overcrowded house was his bachelor uncle, Charlie, and his aunt, Ruth, and her four children.

J.R.'s mom did not get along with her father, and she did her best to earn enough money at low-paying jobs to periodically move herself and J.R. out of the house into the occasional apartment. But eventually, things would go wrong and they'd end up back at Grandpa's.

J.R.'s father was a popular radio DJ in New York City, and J.R. would frequently listen to his father's show on the radio; he began calling him “the Voice.” His father had nothing to do with him and never even paid child support.

He painfully describes waiting for hours on his front porch for his father to pick him up for a promised outing to a Mets game. While listening to him read this section of the book, you can still hear in his adult voice the heartbreak of an 8-year-old boy, desperately hoping that this time his father won't disappoint him.

When his mother finally succeeds in getting a judgment against his father for child support, the man disappears completely to avoid paying. This leaves a void in young J.R.'s life that his mother hopes her brother, Charlie, will fill. She convinces Charlie to take young J.R. on one of his outings to the beach, along with his buddies from the neighborhood bar where he works, Dickens.

J.R. looks forward to these days at the beach. The men are at first reluctant to have a kid tag along, but they come to like J.R. and he becomes “one of the guys.” They teach him how to swim and he learns all about their adventures at Dickens.

J.R. loves his mom and constantly worries about her and their lack of money. One day, he wanders into a small bookstore in the mall and he begins spending all of his free time there reading books. He makes friends with the two shy store employees, Bud and Bill, and they take him under their wing and hire him to work at the store.

As J.R. goes to high school, Bill and Bud convince him that he should go to college. They believe that he can get into Yale, although he is not a great student and has no money. They give him the confidence to believe in himself, and with his mother behind him, he achieves what he never could have dreamed; he is accepted into Yale University.

The work is very difficult at Yale, and he meets a beautiful coed named Sydney, with whom he falls madly in love. His affair is a rocky one, and his grades suffer.

When J.R. turns 18, he is thrilled because now he can legally drink, which means he can go to the neighborhood pub where Uncle Charlie works. Now he can be a part of the nightly ritual of drinking, talking and joking with the men with whom he took trips to the beach. There he can learn to be a man, or so he thinks.

Following graduation from Yale, J.R. has trouble finding a job. He ends up as a salesman at Lord & Taylor in the home goods department. He is very good at selling crystal vases, much to the discontent of the older women who work there, whom he refers to as “the Suffragettes.”

His lack of ambition disturbs his mother and Sydney. They try to talk him into finding something in his field, but it is a visit from his cousin McGraw, now a college baseball player, where he sees the light. McGraw loves baseball and after seeing how happy he is doing what he loves, J.R. decides he must give his love, writing, a chance.

He ends up as a copyboy at the New York Times, and his adventures there lead to bigger and better things. The epilogue to the book describes an article J.R. is writing about how Sept. 11 affected his hometown of Manhasset, who lost many people that day in the World Trade Center.

“The Tender Bar” is an homage to believing in yourself and how important it is to have someone who believes in you, pushing you to do well. J.R. had his loving, hard-working mom, Bill and Bud, his Uncle Charlie and Steve, the owner of the bar, who taught him how to be a man and how necessary it is to discover the passion in your life.

I give “The Tender Bar” four and half stars.

Auburn native Diane La Rue's

lifelong goal is to read a book a week. If you have suggestions, e-mail her at laruediane2000@yahoo.com