Yet when Joe Queenan discovered his father's cancer, he gave financial and emotional support to the terminally-ill man. After years of abuse, it is unsurprising that the relationship between the father and his four children broke down. I found the final chapters very interesting. I sense that Queenan's trademark 'acerbic riffs', to quote the front jacket, demonstrate his long term response to the injustices the child observed. Children deserve better treatment, says Queenan, as he looks back in anger at the social and economic discrimination the family suffered. Such a poor environment for growing leaves its mark on the adult. In his family, though, they had to gnaw uncooked pasta until midnight, waiting for their father to return home from the bar with the remains of his pay check. Joe Queenan's life story leaves me full of admiration for the man he became.īeing poor, Joe Queenan points out, is not by itself so terrible: children survive hunger and poverty when they are loved. Against the odds, the bright young Joe used the Roman Catholic church and a college education to lever his way out of terribly inadequate family circumstances. The family moved into social housing in a spiral of downward social mobility as his father became less and less capable of holding down a job. It seems that Mrs Queenan lacked homemaking and parenting skills and realized early on that she had made a poor choice of mate. Otherwise, he was an alcoholic, frequently beating his young children.

Practically the only way his father provided a role model was in his love of reading. He grew up in Philadelphia, born to parents so immersed in their own problems that they made little attempt to love or care for their four children. His world was a far cry from the middle class background of most aspiring writers of his generation. Joe Queenan made good despite a deprived and neglected childhood. Joe Queenan sets the record straight about his alcoholic father and deprived Catholic childhood in Philadelphia in the 1950's and 1960's. Summary: A detailed memoir of a father/son relationship.

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