These are not hard spankings in response to childish transgressions but brutal attacks provoked by alcohol and low self-esteem. From first page to last, “Closing Time” is a book about living with a drunken, violently abusive father, a man who routinely beats his son and daughters. Yet the priests and the poverty, the girls and the music, are almost beside the point, amusing as Queenan’s accounts of them are. One spends each Saturday afternoon “updating us on how useless we were” and acting “as if he was getting ready to slug somebody.” Another is the same person to whom Queenan and his classmates must confess their sins - not through the screen of a confessional, either, but in a brightly lighted room. His band specializes in “Bar Mitzvah Acid Folk,” at least until he falls in love with a doomed young woman who introduces him to classical music.īefore he arrives at college, his education is overseen by belligerent priests. He works in a haberdashery, a drugstore, a bubble-gum factory. He serves as an altar boy, moves into and out of a housing project, spends a year in a seminary and three more at Cardinal Dougherty High School. In “Closing Time,” he writes with his usual caustic finesse, this time about growing up Irish and poor in Philadelphia in the 1950s and ’60s. (Apr.Whether you think of Joe Queenan as refreshingly blunt or too mean for his own good, his 10th book is likely to intensify your opinion.

Unsentimental and brutally honest, Queenan’s memoir captures the pathos of growing up in a difficult family and somehow getting beyond it. 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.

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.

Queenan’s father was a pugnacious drunk who declaimed passages from great literature and often chatted loudly late at night with God. Queenan closes the chapter on his life with a verbally and physically abusive alcoholic father. ) turns the mirror on himself in this somber and funny memoir about life with father in the projects of Philadelphia.

Humorist and pop culture writer Queenan ( Queenan Country

Closing time by joe queenan