A Drinking Life: A Memoir (1995) - Plot & Excerpts
With A Drinking Life, Hamill has written the great American proletarian memoir. Which is no small feat considering, aside from his working class roots, Hamill has become anything but a proletariat. I’m not disputing he was a hard working journalist who put his time in writing for the New York Post – a profession almost as hard as his former two fisted drinking binges. But what I find interesting is Hamill’s insistence on romancing his working stiff upbringing as if it somehow not only justifies his drinking, but also allows him the credibility to poetically philosophize the psyche of the entire working class. Well written, concise, compact and prose driven A Drinking Life is Hamill’s narrative of his attempts at several careers, school, love, marriage, and his relationship with his father – all of which he lost, abandoned, or simple ignored, due to his alcoholism. Waxing nostalgically he chronologically leads us through his life: from birth, to adolescence, and finally adulthood. The majority of the book concentrates on his rather tough childhood in Brooklyn New York. Where, due to his father’s inability to work as a result of his alcoholism, at the age of 16, Hamill left school to work in the Navy shipyards. Torn between earning money for his family, and resuming his education, Hamill follows in his father’s footsteps and begins drinking as a way of coping with the difficulties of life. 195 pages into his book, the entirety being 265 pages, Hamill hasn’t taken us far. He’s in his twenties and is attending College in Mexico. Due to his drinking he has run afoul of the law and is incarcerated in jail. Not the best of circumstances to begin with, his experience is brutally horrendous. From his detailed and lengthy depiction of this episode, one would think it a pivotal turning point for him. Knowing he was there due to his drinking it would seem Hamill is showing us this scene because it influenced him, or gave him reason to reevaluate his lifestyle. Instead it appears his inclusion of this scene is primarily for establishing his credibility as a libertarian of the underprivileged. Although thoroughly mortified by what he has witnessed, Hamill does nothing, and flees Mexico, returning to New York to attend the prestigious Pratt Institute to continue his studies, and eventually become a journalist/reporter. Interestingly this is when Hamill’s drinking began to escalate in earnest, only he caulks it up as merely a hazard of the profession, sort of gentleman’s club activity for journalists. Leaving me wondering if Hamill was ever going to take responsibility for his drinking. Yet what is of further interest, and what pretty much answers that question with a resounding “kind of,” is his leaving only the last 52 pages to describe the next twenty years of his life: his final days of drinking, his failed marriage, abandoning his children, his extramarital affairs, his workaholic behavior. As if it was all something he preferred to forget rather than admit. However in these last few chapters Hammill writes some of his strongest work, allowing to reader to catch a glimpse of who he really was. Yet unfortunately in the final five-page epilogue titled “Dry,” Hamill simply tells us he just quit drinking and than attempts to explain it away as a decision he made, rather than it being a result of trying to repair all the damage he has done to himself and those around him. Hardly the insightful summary I had expected. Yet maybe that was my problem from the very beginning. I expected more. I wasn’t so concerned with the colorful tales of his childhood, or his youthful transgressions, instead I would have been more interested in the factual, not so glamorous, aspect of his drinking life. But then, having already been swayed by the book’s hype – the least of which coming from the New York Times’ book review: “Tough-minded, brimming with energy, and unflinchingly honest.” I came prepared to read a much different story.
This book is an autobiography of Pete Hamill, a reporter and writer from Brooklyn, New York. He grew up in the forties, during the war. His father was (yawn) an Irish immigrant who drank too much (yawn), was mean to his family (yawn). Pete's mother was a loving, intelligent woman who does not get nearly enough credit in this book. Unfortunately, Pete resembles his father in the selfish way he lives his life. The best part of this book is the early part, with descriptions of life in Brooklyn during the 40s. He plays games with other kids, runs around the neighborhood, and loves comic books. There is a real street life because no one has TVs yet.As the oldest in his family, his perspective is unique, but Mr. H. does not delve into much discussion there, something I would have been interested in. I am one of the youngest, and it was very interesting to contemplate the space of the olders... His experience was far different than, say brother number five, or only sister number 3. The major grievance I have with this book is that I started to realy dislike the narrator and his pick and choose method of telling his story. For example, bartenders get more attention than his siblings. Only two brothers get any attention. This is likly because, he did not spend much time with the younger ones? It the same w/ his first marriage. He marries a very young woman (Age 18 to his 26 or more years), and doesn't really explain why. He also doesn't explain why, after divorcing, he sends his two kids to boarding school in Switzerland. We hear about his early sex live, his relationship w/ Shirley McClain, but not why they broke up. It is partly the price of reading an autobiography, I admit, but still. The title is "A Drinking Life" and he tracks his drinking, from a young teenager and beyond. Finally he gets sick of it and stops. This is well after his marriage has ended. His kids probably benefited from this, but he does not bring them home, since Shirley is not into being any kind of step mom. This is a case of the man quitting the drink and is still a selfish ass hole! He loved comic books as a kid and tries to tie comic book characters who drink potions to transform into super heroes to his view of alcohol and its allure of transformation. He sees his father drink and become mean and abusive. He sees his mother work work work and have babies indefinitely. The author goes on and on about his relationship with his father, but after he is about 12, his mother gets mentioned less and less. I started to resent this. Hamill is in Belfast with his father the time JFK was assassinated. What a self indulgent piece of work. Ohhh boo hoo for you and your drunk daddy. I'm not dismissing his emotions, it is just he is such a selfish bastard it is hard to look over his horrible husbandry to feel empathy for him howling in the dark streets, and everyone knows the Kennedys are a bunch of fake heros. So, this book held my interest because my contempt for it grew and grew.... I did like the neighbors drinking tea in the hot summer nights. Also, there are some fierce sex scenes, if you are into that.
What do You think about A Drinking Life: A Memoir (1995)?
Much like David Byrne's Bicycle Diaries, the title for Pete Hamill's memoir is a bit of a misnomer; to be sure, drinking plays a central role in Hamill's life, but this reads much more like a standard autobiography with lots of drinking to serve as the backdrop. Which is fine, of course, if you're a reader who happens to be interested in the life of Pete Hamill. I wasn't, necessarily, and that became a barrier to my enjoyment of the book.So why wasn't I interested? Well, I might have been, but the book spectacularly manages to get off on the wrong foot. There's so much ironic narrative distance in the sections where Hamill describes himself as a boy that the prose is nearly unbearable. If nothing else, it seems amateurish. One such example, though you could find one on nearly every page, comes from when the adolescent Pete observes a friend's sister doing some rooftop sunbathing: She lathered suntan oil on her bright pink body, rubbed some on the tops of her breasts, then lay back with her eyes closed and her abundant black hair spilling onto a white towel. I didn't know why but that made me feel funny. I turned away and went down the street. I did not tell my mother about this.This type of downright obvious narrative distance, when coupled with the goofy Brooklyn-ese and weirdly idealized WWII NYC setting, is grating to say the least. There's nothing in this section we haven't read before. There are no revelations about boyhood, or unique experiences of the war. There is nervousness and confusion. Kids make sense of it through comic books. You've seen this setup in dozens of movies.It gets better, though. Once young Hamill strikes out on his own to make something of himself, the story gets a bit more interesting and the voice a bit more inventive (though there are still lots of plodding passages about breasts). He gets into a scrape in a Mexico jail, which is memorable not only to Hamill but the reader as well. He rubs elbows with NYC literary Somebodies. He philanders and marries and travels and sires. And that's enough to keep the reader going.But it's not enough, unfortunately, to elevate this text above a hoary Pete Hamill reciting his exploits. There's a moment in the book where a friend admonishes him for feeling that he's above everyone else, and that he lords this superiority over his friends and acquaintances. An exchange to which Hamill writes, "And though I was hurt and wounded, another thought slid through my mind: Maybe he was right." Okay, great---some self-awareness, a bit of severely lacking self-excoriation. But Hamill stops there. If he does feel guilt (and I have no reason to believe that he doesn't), he never gets that on the page in the same way that he captures his unease with being a Brooklynite good-ol'-boy or his fascination with art and comics. And really, that's a pretty vital element to a memoir about drinking, isn't it? But it's only ever on the page in brief glimpses. When weighed against his gleefully described drunken escapades, well, a drinking life sounds like a pretty damn good one. I'm guessing that wasn't his intention.
—Derek
Date: 2010Format: Book on CDWhy I read it: I was looking for a book on CD at my local library, and this jumped out. I lived in New York City in the 1970's, when Pete Hamill was a bit of a folk hero.Peter Hamill is clearly an accomplished writer. He presented a picture of life in Irish Brooklyn in the 1940's that I never imagined. He made a bunch of mistakes that surprised me. He was selected to go to the most prestigious Catholic high school in New York City, and changed schools and then dropped out. He'd already started drinkng by then, and the pull of his neighborhood was strong. Plus, he didn't have a bunch of support going to his fancy school. I suppose now he would have received a clothing allowance so he didn't have to wear shoes with holes in the soles.Pete and his (alcoholic) father were in Northern Ireland on the day that President Kennedy was shot. We were all in mourning in the United States. Ireland was distraught. It makes sense. But I never had thought about that aspect.Pete did a bit too much name-dropping for me. But I guess is you held a party in the 1960's and Mick Jagger and Keith Richards showed up, you'd mention it. And your affair with Shirley MacLaine.And he didn't tell me at the end what happened to his ex-wife. And to his daughters that he shipped off to boarding school in Switzerland. And why Switzerland?
—Betsy
This a pretty quick read, both because of the length (fewer than 270 pages) and the straightforward writing style (one of the blurbs on the back, by Elmore Leonard no less!, comments that Hamill doesn't waste a word).The story follows the author's life, as he remembers it, from its start through age 35 or so, 20 years before he wrote the book. Central to the story is the relationship with alcohol that the author, his father, friends, and colleagues had during that period and how it informed, affected, and infected their lives.I eventually found young Hamill's artistic pretensions (pretensions used non-pejoratively), which were the other central part of his life, tedious to read about, but overall this is a solid book that resonated with me.
—Adam
