Earnest memoir of Hamill's drinking days as a Brooklyn youth and
young reporter. Now sober 20 years, Hamill (Tokyo Sketches, 1992,
etc.) looks back on his family life in Brooklyn during the
Depression and WW II, when his father Billy's drinking became a
model for his own liquid career, despite a vow not to follow in
dad's footsteps. As a young man in Ireland, Billy lost a leg
playing soccer, but his agility as a player remained legendary as
the author grew up. Alcohol, Hamill says, removed his father from
any close contact with him or his mother, and the boy aged without
any real models for family life. Hamill began drinking as a bonding
exercise with his street buddies - but he felt apart from them
anyway, was drawn to cartooning (he spells out the history of comic
strips in great detail), and, later, took lessons from Burne
Hogarth, writer/illustrator of the Tarzan comic strip. Hamill quit
school to work in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, joined the Navy during
the Korean War, later entered newspaper work as a rewrite man on
the New York Post. Some background about the author's beloved Post
and fellow reporters, editors, and columnists is included here, but
this is no Front Page memoir in the manner of Ben Hecht. Hamill
tells of watering holes favored by staffers; his lack of contact
with his own wife and family; divorce; his entry into the celebrity
life with Shirley MacLaine; travels in Mexico, Spain, and
elsewhere; and of his putting down the glass forever on New Year's
Eve 1972, doing it alone and without AA. Hamill's various ideas
about why he drank are all welcome, but his more crushing
humiliations as a drinker fail to make us squirm, while his
readable, workaday, humorless style keeps this from placing among
the more forceful books about alcoholism. Maybe it should have been
a novel. (Kirkus Reviews)
As a child during the Depression and World War II, Peter Hamill learned early that drinking was an essential part of being a man, inseparable from the rituals of celebration, mourning, friendship, romance, and religion. Only later did he discover its ability to destroy any writer's most valuable tools: clarity, consciousness, memory. In A Drinking Life, Hamill explains how alcohol slowly became a part of his life, and how he ultimately left it behind. Along the way, he summons the mood of an America that is gone forever, with the bittersweet fondness of a lifetime New Yorker.
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