And being a writer, he couldn’t help himself and so wrote a book about what it all meant to him. Like most sons of drunks, he loved his dad but couldn’t stand being near him. Many of Queenan’s sheep were slaughtered in Hollywood his best milieu was, and is, movie reviews.īut you won’t be surprised that Dr Queenan leaves his scalpel sheathed for much of this book. Before he reformed and wrote My Goodness: A Cynic’s Short-Lived Search for Sainthood, an odd apologia to his victims, Queenan had eviscerated more bodies than David smote Amalekites.

Queenan is known for being a scathing, fast-fisted, full-body satirist.

eventually learned, after initially misunderstanding his father’s example, that to drink to excess often was not wise. Which is also not to say that his drunken father wasn’t a pain in the keister and that his father wasn’t influential. Which is to say, his was not an atypical departure from the experiences of many kids of poor, blue-collar families in the 1960s. That, with some minor action comprising working various summer jobs and getting dumped by a talented musician, forms the whole of Queenan’s early life story. Later, after many years and much repetition of the same, he died, to the tremendous relief of Queenan, his ma and his sisters. Joe Queenan’s dad was a self-defeating drunk who beat his kids, lost his jobs, foreswore swearing while raving and ranting and attending church, and who occasionally read good books. Queenan's unforgettable account of the damage done to children by parents without futures and of the grace children find to move beyond these experiences will appeal to fans of Augusten Burroughs and Mary Karr, and will take its place as an autobiography in the classic American tradition.Recommendation: Borrow from a library if you’re going fishing and think you won’t be catching much. With the help of a series of mentors and surrogate fathers, and armed with his own furious love of books and music, Joe begins the long flight away from the dismal confines of his neighborhood-with a brief misbegotten stop at a seminary-and into the wider world. By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Closing Time recounts Queenan's Irish Catholic upbringing in a family dominated by his erratic father, a violent yet oddly charming emotional terrorist whose alcoholism fuels a limitless torrent of self-pity, railing, destruction, and late-night chats with the Lord Himself. In Closing Time, Queenan turns his sights on a more serious and personal topic: his childhood in a Philadelphia housing project in the early 1960s. Joe Queenan's acerbic riffs on movies, sports, books, politics, and many of the least forgivable phenomena of pop culture have made him one of the most popular humorists and commentators of our time.

Closing time by joe queenan