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jjp723 's review for:
Drinking with Men: A Memoir
by Rosie Schaap
I couldn't wait to read this book. I like drinking, I like bars, I like the characters one meets in bars - and while this has all that, something is still missing for me. I really like Rosie Schaap and wish I could have a drink with her in real life, and other than one disconcerting story at the start of the book regarding the author and an episode of crapping her pants, I liked the book. It just seemed to me that she didn't go deeply enough into her relationships with the people she knew at various bars, with the exception of Ed. A nice read but it left me wanting.
*I wanted to feel like myself again. And even if I wasn't exactly sure what that might mean, I knew it would involve a bar.*
*What fun is a team that wins all the time? Where is the dramatic tension, the possibility of being surprised by joy once in a while amidst all the heartache? It seemed far too much like being a Yankees fan, an altogether weak and unimaginative proposition.*
*Because if you can talk, and if you can listen, and if it is easy and pleasurable to talk and listen to anyone, because you're happy to discuss anything, really, and to hear stories about anything, because you know people are endlessly interesting and you know that they all have stories, and because liquor loosens tongues and you are paying attention and taking people seriously, you might just stand to learn something. Because at the bar it doesn't matter if you're an ironworker or a classics professor, a Trotskyite or a Reaganite, a Midwestern kid fresh out of college who moved to New York intent on making it as a rock star or some pickled old coot singing "The Rose of Tralee" into his whiskey. The bar is a leveler.*
*I wanted to feel like myself again. And even if I wasn't exactly sure what that might mean, I knew it would involve a bar.*
*What fun is a team that wins all the time? Where is the dramatic tension, the possibility of being surprised by joy once in a while amidst all the heartache? It seemed far too much like being a Yankees fan, an altogether weak and unimaginative proposition.*
*Because if you can talk, and if you can listen, and if it is easy and pleasurable to talk and listen to anyone, because you're happy to discuss anything, really, and to hear stories about anything, because you know people are endlessly interesting and you know that they all have stories, and because liquor loosens tongues and you are paying attention and taking people seriously, you might just stand to learn something. Because at the bar it doesn't matter if you're an ironworker or a classics professor, a Trotskyite or a Reaganite, a Midwestern kid fresh out of college who moved to New York intent on making it as a rock star or some pickled old coot singing "The Rose of Tralee" into his whiskey. The bar is a leveler.*