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E-mailOvercoming a frightful childhood
“Closing Time” is noted writer Joe Queenan’s account of growing up penniless and Irish American in the Philly projects, in daily fear of his abusive alcoholic father. He talks about the memoir and the 17-year reign of terror that was his childhood
When he was a young boy growing up in the South Philadelphia projects, Irish American journalist and cultural critic Joe Queenan, 59, spent most of his nights cowering in terror from his father’s studded leather belt.
“As a child I felt locked in a house with this scary guy,” he said. “When he hit us half the time he didn’t know what he was doing.
“I could never understand why he needed to use a belt. He was this big guy. I grew up thinking one of these days I’ll be big and strong and I’ll kill him.”
Night after night his father, a half-coherent drunk, consumed with bitterness and rage, lashed out at someone five times smaller than himself. And as bad as the physical assaults were, the hateful things he would say to his wife and kids was often worse.
“My father liked to remind us, pretty much constantly, that no matter how hard we tried we’d never amount to a pimple on an elephant’s rear,” says Queenan. “Yet tellingly, like so many Irish American men, he still had that amazing ability to make his victims feel sorry for him.”
Queenan, a celebrated satirist, now lives in Tarrytown, New York, with his wife Francesca and his children Bridget and Gordon. He has called himself a “full time son of a bitch” who has “never deviated from his chosen career as a sneering churl.” Formerly an editor at Forbes, Queenan has published his stories in The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Esquire, Vogue and New York Magazine.
How Queenan escaped his desperately impoverished childhood to become a distinguished man of letters is the subject of his remarkable new memoir, the raw but beautifully written "Closing Time."
Appropriately, considering the many horror tales he recounts, Queenan forgoes his usual satirical tone in favor of a fairly straightforward portrait of his harsh upbringing in the South Philly projects, showing how a series of kindly mentors and surrogate fathers were the ones who saved him from a dead end life.
Says Queenan, “Everyone who is saved is saved because someone tosses them a lifeline, or in my case, numerous lifelines. It may be an employer, it may be a teacher, it may be a priest or a parole officer. But as the events of Good Friday make clear, no one is saved by himself.”
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