Closing Time: A Memoir

by Joe Queenan

Overview

An affecting memoir from one of America's most provocative humorists

Over the past two decades, Joe Queenan has established himself as a scourge of everything that is half-baked, half-witted, and halfhearted in American culture. In Closing Time, Queenan turns his sights on a more serious and a more personal topic: his childhood in a Philadelphia housing project in the early 1960s. By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Closing Time recounts Queenan's Irish Catholic upbringing in a family dominated by his erratic, alcoholic father, and his long flight away from the dismal confines of his neighborhood into the greater, wide world. A story about salvation and escape, Closing Time has at its heart the makings of a classic American autobiography.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143116684
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/30/2010
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	507,357
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Joe Queenan is the author of seven books and a regular contributor to The New York Times, Barron’s and The Los Angeles Times, a columnist for Chief Executive, and writes about movies and music for Great Britain’s The Guardian. Formerly an editor at Forbes and Spy, television critic at People, and a columnist at TV Guide, GQ, Smart Money, Men’s Health, Barron’s Online and Movieline, his stories have appeared in scores of national publications, including The New Republic, Time, Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Daily News, the New York Observer, Playboy, Rolling Stone, Us, Golf Digest, The Weekly Standard, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Vogue, Town & Country, Allure, and New York. His work has appeared overseas in The Independent, The Spectator, The Toronto Globe & Mail, the Times of London, and Bon. Queenan has been a guest on "The Late Show with David Letterman", "The Daily Show", "Today", "Good Morning, America", "Charlie Rose" and "Late Night with Conan O'Brien", a frequent guest on "Imus in the Morning", and appeared more than two-dozen times on "Politically Incorrect". He regularly writes and hosts radio features for the BBC, and for three years was host of the BBC weekly radio program "Postcard from Gotham". In 2005, he won a Sports Emmy for his work on HBO’s "Inside the NFL". He is married, with two children, and lives in Tarrytown, N.Y.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 The Man on the Roof 1

Chapter 2 Sin City 20

Chapter 3 The Predicament 51

Chapter 4 Domine, Non Sum Dignus 83

Chapter 5 Semper Fidelis 106

Chapter 6 The Parting of the Reed Sea 152

Chapter 7 Twilight of the Apothecaries 185

Chapter 8 C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre 213

Chapter 9 Second Fiddle 235

Chapter 10 Management Potential 249

Chapter 11 Walkabout 284

Chapter 12 Closing Time 315

Epilogue 334

Acknowledgments 339

What People are Saying About This

Mary Roach

"I used to envy Joe Queenan because his writing is smarter and funnier than mine. Now here is something altogether new to envy. Joe has taken the blood, bile, cheap beer, and Lawrence Welk Shows of his horrid childhood and made something shining and redemptive and deeply honest. I tore through this book like Queenan senior on his fourth six-pack, though without throwing any chairs through the window."--(Mary Roach, bestselling author of Stiff, Spook and Bonk)

From the Publisher

"An ambitious memoir.... Optimally engrossing, thanks to Queenan's gift for storytelling and acidic humor." —-The Philadelphia Inquirer

Editorial Reviews

[Queenan's] childhood and adolescence were tough, at times brutally so, yet there isn't a whisper of whine here, only a determination to face the truth as squarely as he can and to describe it without self-pity or sentimentality…It is a fine piece of work in every respect: self-exploratory but never self-absorbed, painful and funny, affectingly open in the gratitude it expresses to father figures without whom "I would have been sucked into the void." By contrast with the post-adolescent drivel that is the daily bread of the Age of Memoir, Closing Time is by a grownup, for grownups.
—The Washington Post

Jonathan Yardley

As the book progresses…Mr. Queenan gradually finds a more nuanced voice, capable of expressing not just fury and condescension but also humor, irony and melancholy. His tortured relationship with his father slowly gains in depth and chiaroscuro, and his portraits of friends, relatives and teachers evolve into Dickensian character studies even as they immerse us in the gritty Philadelphia neighborhoods he knew as a boy.
—The New York Times

Michiko Kakutani

Humorist and pop culture writer Queenan (Queenan Country) turns the mirror on himself in this somber and funny memoir about life with father in the projects of Philadelphia. Queenan closes the chapter on his life with a verbally and physically abusive alcoholic father. Queenan's father was a pugnacious drunk who declaimed passages from great literature and often chatted loudly late at night with God. Early in the memoir, Queenan expresses the searingly honest sentiment that becomes the refrain of the book: "I never forgave my father for the way he treated us." Queenan spent most of his life trying to get away from this father; he found refuge in the public library, and for at least a year ran off to a seminary with the intention of joining the priesthood. After his father's death, as he was casting about for some way to put a spin on their relationship, Queenan recalls that acting as a stenographer for his father-who in his drunken rages would reel off letters to the editor about various social injustices-was the moment when the thought of making a living as a writer first entered his head. Unsentimental and brutally honest, Queenan's memoir captures the pathos of growing up in a difficult family and somehow getting beyond it. (Apr.)

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Publishers Weekly

Journalist and humorist Queenan's (Queenan Country) touching and funny memoir begins by focusing on his childhood in a Philadelphia housing project in the early 1960s. He grew up with an alcoholic, abusive father, whose destructive behavior prompted the author to be different from his father and find a better life for himself elsewhere. What gave him hope when he was young was the Catholic Church, the affection of his relatives, and the local public library. Queenan discovers his path out through perseverance and inspirational father figures. At an early age, he embraces his great love of books and music and considers a career in the seminary. Queenan's early memories of typing up his father's drunken rants on social issues so his father could send them to newspaper editors lead him to try a writing career after his father's death. This honest memoir is a great read and will captivate readers who have dealt with family tragedies. Recommended for public and academic libraries.
—Susan McClellan

Library Journal

The waggish blue-collar Philly scribe (Queenan Country: A Reluctant Anglophile's Pilgrimage to the Mother Country, 2004, etc.) ornaments his tough-childhood memoir with the sort of fancy writing natural to authors of Hibernian extraction. The Queenan family, never in the chips, had a hardscrabble life in the scruffy Irish-American precincts of the City of Brotherly Love. Love was scant. Mom was a terrible cook, and Father was a terrible drunk. The youngster's life was one of ongoing deprivation and off-brand merchandise in various tatterdemalion parishes. Queenan and his sisters couldn't wait to vacate their hostile family encampments on the wrong side of the Schuylkill River. At 13, the besieged lad believed he had an ecclesiastical vocation, but after one year at Maryknoll Junior Seminary he abandoned the cloth. So it was on to Catholic high school, then a Catholic college. He found surrogate fathers, first in a colorful dry-goods merchant who ran a kind of urban emporium, replete with picaresque clientele, next in an oddball apothecary. Further forming his persona were various part-time jobs, including the midnight shift at a bubblegum mill. Scrambling out of the proletariat, Queenan discovered art, music and Paris. He became a man of letters, but even after he achieved his dream ("to make a living by ridiculing people") he was still haunted by a lifelong enemy-his father. Queenan pere, his son recounts, was brutal and mean, no credit to any 12-step program. The text, mostly credible, is naturally infused with the Celtic gift of gab, garnished with grand displays of highfalutin lexicon. Loquacious and rococo, it is populated by congresses of poltroons and excoriates many mangynincompoops. Evidently Queenan resorts to his venerable thesaurus in an attempt to channel that heathen Mencken's lexical cantrips. Fortunately, the adverbial and adjectival antics work, and the flashes of characteristic caustic wit are accompanied by some truly sweet spots. Close to home and heart, this portrait of the artist shows Queenan at the top of his form-his best yet.

Kirkus Reviews

"An ambitious memoir.... Optimally engrossing, thanks to Queenan's gift for storytelling and acidic humor." ---The Philadelphia Inquirer

From the Publisher

With sophisticated language and eloquent observations, the author remembers his family's poverty and his alcoholic father's cruelty. Juxtaposing his perceptions as both a child of the 1950s and as an adult long afterwards creates a listening experience both tender and compelling. Johnny Heller's raspy yet soft voice so aptly grasps the clever language and rhythm that no listener will feel, even for a moment, that Heller isn't Joe Queenan. His pace seems rapid at first as he pushes past the writerly phrases and metaphors. However, as the richly told story moves forward, Heller's tempo soon has the effect of facilitating the pleasure that audio readers search for in literature. More than just childhood memories, CLOSING TIME captures the attitudes and mores of a time gone by. J.A.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

AUGUST 2009 - AudioFile