In this book, journalist Moehringer writes a memoir of his time growing up on Long Island, his time as a college student, his time as a burgeoning journalist and how all of it was anchored by his relationship to the corner bar owned by his uncle and the weird assortment of strange characters he met there over the years. If this sounds like kind of a hacky setup, you’re not entirely wrong, but I think some writers could do something with this premise. Not Moehringer though. This book encapsulates everything I hate about memoir. Moehringer has no sense of what is and isn’t artistically significant about his own life and the book stretches to nearly four-hundred-and-fifty densely packed pages. At about the 390 to 400 mark, he dedicates an entire chapter to a parrot one of his roommates owned for a while. I’m not sure why this wasn’t a red flag to Moehringer, except, as I say, we are usually as ill equipped to comment on our own lives as on anything. These are the blinders that come with the territory of memoir, so maybe he shouldn’t be blamed. His editors, on the other hand . . . I’m not sure how they let this disaster pass. There’s an easy and completely painless hundred pages that could go right off the bat. But there’s no reason this book should be over three-hundred pages, except for Moehringer’s tendencies to blow up every detail to gargantuan size. Likewise, he has all the worst self-mythologizing tendencies of memoirists. Obviously, there’s myth-making in every memoir, but Moehringer’s insufferable tone is the worst I’ve ever encountered. That’s to say nothing of the fact that he is constantly undercutting his po-faced arrogance with self-deprecating remarks about how sorry he is that he’s mythologizing things, but then ruefully shaking his head and continuing to do it. Plus, it isn’t just the typical exaggeration of memoir, which is fine with me if done artistically; there are sections here that I’d bet twenty bucks are pure fabrications, like an astounding section in which he abandons a girl in the desert for over two hours after realizing that he’s forgotten to bring a condom with him. After hours of adventures, he returns with condom in hand and he proceeds to actually have sex with her. She has sex with him, he would have us believe, after he abandoned her in the New Mexican desert for two hours in the pitch black of night without even telling her where he was going or if he was coming back. Is it just me or is this completely laughable? It’s obvious this didn’t happen. And if it did, then it’s even worse, because I’m pretty sure it was a rape, because that’s really the only possible way a guy gets laid in that scenario. Moehringer isn’t an untalented stylist. The writing is sometimes good and he gets a few laughs here and there. And a few of the supporting characters come to life in nice ways, particularly a woman Moehringer has a relationship with in college that he’s kind of haunted by over the years. One gets the feeling that he’s kind of trying to paint her in an ungenerous way, but he’s so insufferable as a narrator, that I ended up having a lot of empathy with her. Anyway, she feels very real. On the whole, I found this book to be a very negative experience and for sure, those last thirty to forty pages are just a brutal slog as you see the end in sight, but it never seems to get any closer. I have no idea why this was such an acclaimed book; it’s a real disaster. 1 ½ stars.
tl;dr – maudlin memoir indulges in the worst tendencies of the genre to create a frustrating, often silly book; Moehringer has some facility with style, but plenty of tics too. 1 ½ star.