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    Drinking with Men
    Drinking with Men
    Drinking with Men
    Audiobook7 hours

    Drinking with Men

    Written by Rosie Schaap

    Narrated by Rosie Schaap

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    A vivid, funny, and poignant memoir that celebrates the distinct lure of the camaraderie and community one finds drinking in bars.

    Rosie Schaap has always loved bars: the wood and brass and jukeboxes, the knowing bartenders, and especially the sometimes surprising but always comforting company of regulars. Starting with her misspent youth in the bar car of a regional railroad, where at fifteen she told commuters’ fortunes in exchange for beer, and continuing today as she slings cocktails at a neighborhood joint in Brooklyn, Schaap has learned her way around both sides of a bar and come to realize how powerful the fellowship among regular patrons can be.

    In Drinking with Men, Schaap shares her unending quest for the perfect local haunt, which takes her from a dive outside Los Angeles to a Dublin pub full of poets, and from small-town New England taverns to a character-filled bar in Manhattan’s TriBeCa. Drinking alongside artists and expats, ironworkers and soccer fanatics, she finds these places offer a safe haven, a respite, and a place to feel most like herself. In rich, colorful prose, Schaap brings to life these seedy, warm, and wonderful rooms. Drinking with Men is a love letter to the bars, pubs, and taverns that have been Schaap’s refuge, and a celebration of the uniquely civilizing source of community that is bar culture at its best.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateJan 24, 2013
    ISBN9781469236292
    Drinking with Men
    Author

    Rosie Schaap

    Rosie Schaap has been a bartender, a fortune-teller, a librarian at a paranormal society, an English teacher, an editor, a preacher, a community organizer, and a manager of homeless shelters. A contributor to This American Life and npr.org, she writes the “Drink” column for The New York Times Magazine. She was born in New York City and still lives there.

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    Reviews for Drinking with Men

    3.5/5

    71 ratings24 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Drinking with Men extols the pleasures of the neighborhood bar. For the author it goes beyond pleasure and becomes a necessity. Within bars Schaap finds community and a safe, fun place to hang out. I know people seek out bars to drink..and the same bar to feel at home. Yes, I have seen Cheers, the Boston bar-centric TV show where "everybody knows your name" . Now I have insight into what a bar can mean to a real person.Schaap's memoir is presented in chronological chapters, each centering around her favorite frequented bar at the time. She has led an interesting life and bars figure prominently in her everyday existence. I would have enjoyed the book less if she had children. The specter of serious alcoholism looms in the shadows here. As it is, I admire that she does what makes her happy and shares her enthusiasm through writing.Definately recommended.
    • 4/5
      Rosie Schapp has felt a kinship to bars since being a teenager and takes us through each bar she became a regular at, how and why she ended up there, and how and why each place helped her through a certain period in her life. She seems to outgrow the bars after some time there, although that doesn't lessen the connection she feels. Schapp is an entertaining writer and I enjoyed this memoir.
    • 2/5
      The first two chapters were fascinating. The rest was just meh.
    • 4/5
      This book gave me a new appreciation for bar culture. It made me want to go out and spend hours talking with strangers, just for life-enriching variety than Rosie Schaap describes. But... the gender connection was not well fleshed out. A title that highlighted the coming of age story/memoir theme of the book would be better-- maybe, "Martini with an Oliver Twist"?
    • 4/5
      Drinking with Men is well-written; a very enjoyable read. Schaap's ability, as a woman, to walk into a bar alone and comfortably enjoy herself is uncommon, and makes for a good story. The book is full of interesting details about the people she meets, and the community and culture of bars.
    • 3/5
      Nice writing.
    • 4/5
      From the onset, I identified with Rosie Schaap. In the introduction to "Drinking with Men", she quotes from a 1936 book by Vogue editor Marjorie Hillis, "We don't advise [going alone into a bar]. If you must have your drink, you can have it in a lounge or restaurant, where you won't look forlorn or conspicuous." I have a few problems with this: 1.) How is sitting alone in a restaurant less pathetic than sitting alone in a bar? and 2.) I find it sad that almost 80 years later, this same rule applies. In general, it's acceptable for men to stop by the bar on the way home from work, but if a woman is at the bar by herself people assume something's wrong with her or she was stood up."Drinking with Men" is a memoir told through Schaap's time at 11 different bars. Schaap describes herself as a "serial monogamist" when it comes to drinking establishments, basically living at one until one day it loses its charm and she moves on to another. We follow Schaap from trading tarot readings for underage beers on a commuter train to living as a foreign exchange student in Dublin to a new life she found in New York after 9/11. While discussing the disasters that were her academic career and marriage, she somehow manages to stay superficial. But by the end of the book, I felt like I knew her. Each vignette shows a different side of her personality. In the commuter train it was freedom, in her 20s she desperately wanted to be viewed as an adult, and at The Fish Bar in New York she found comfort in her adopted family at her time of need."You can drink anywhere...but a good bar? It's more than a place to have a few pints or shots or cocktails. It is much more than the sum of its bottles and bar stools, its glassware and taps and neon beer signs, It's more like a community center, for people - men and women - who happen to drink." (pg. 7)Someday I hope to find a place in Fargo where I can feel like I belong. A bar that's not too big, too noisy, or too bright - someplace I can take my book and have a drink.
    • 4/5
      I heard Ms Schaap interviewed on NPR a few weeks ago and her take on life-- by the bars she frequents--seemed an interesting way to approach a memoir. She takes readers through her life from the bar car on the train as a teenager, to an Irish bar, college bar, grad school bar and various dives she has known and loved throughout the years.Drinking With Men (because she finds women are often uninterested in bar culture) is a valentine to bars. She writes so poetically about what it means to be a regular patron of a bar in a city that I actually found myself envious that I have never been a regular in a bar. I am not even sure I have ever been in the kind of bar she frequents and has written about. Maybe, I thought, I should even consider opening my own bar.So yes, I enjoyed this book. It was fun to read and enjoy her observations of life in the bar and watch her grow up in bars and with their patrons. I did observe early on, that she really did not seem like my kind of person. That for all her romance about bars and drinking, I didn't really like her. (Although on NPR she sounded quite likable.) I feel torn: interesting book, good writing, unlikeable narrator.The biggest criticism I have of her memoir is that she unfairly dodged, what I would consider the central question of the book. About half way through the memoir, in a chapter about skipping all her classes in grad school to hang out at her current bar of choice, she is one day reading her roommate's journal and reads her roommate's observations that she, Rosie, is an alcoholic. It never occurred to her that she was an alcoholic, and she begins to consider the question. It is a moment for me that the memoir began to quicken and picked up my interest. I read it in rapt attention, how would this realization change her life? But suddenly, she changes the subject, and meanders off to another topic, even though it seemed she was about to conclude she had a big problem. She never went back to the question again. So, although I certainly loved her stories in bars and her love of even the divey-est of them, I wonder if she will ever consider the big question again.
    • 3/5
      Schaap began drinking in bars at a young age, so she has many bars to reminisce over- the artists' bars of Dublin, the lone bar in her smalltown college days, the divey bars of NYC. This is a memoir by a woman who was often one of the few women, and often one of the youngest patrons, in the bars she frequented. And by frequented, it means that when she found a bar she liked it became a home for her, a place she went to every night. It seems strange that it isn't until nearly 200 pages in that Schaap wonders if she might be an alcoholic, after relaying the solid years of spending hours nearly every night drinking hard liquor, but she ponders the question, then quickly decides that she has spent her life in bars for the company.This is an ER, and for the most part it is a well-written and interesting read. I have to admit that her teen years as a Grateful Dead groupie (in the 80's) gave me the creeps, and I really lost interest towards the end of the book when she finds God out of the blue.
    • 4/5
      Writer and part-time bartender Rosie Schaap, chronicles her drinking life in this memoir of making a home and a family in her New York neighborhood bars. Thankfully this was not a guilt ridden, downward alcoholic spiral into destruction and despair, but a psalm to hanging out and being a regular with the guys. Bar life became a milieu where the best friends have the most memorable conversations of their lives and create a social order and substitute family in this cozy world that beats anything on the outside. Schaap is a great story teller and has a refreshing take on drinking (a lot) with friends.
    • 5/5
      The uncorrected proof of "Drinking With Men" by Rosie Schaap, which I have had the pleasure of reading is 269 pages. In these 269 pages Ms. Schaap gets it right. I always consider the writing,the actual phrasing, the organization of the material, the way the reader is brought into the story. Memoirs can sink or swim based on these things. Schaap covers a great deal of material in this book, but I never felt swamped by it. It is clearly written, orderly and whether or not you agree with her, you can visualize her experiences clearly.I didn't expect what I got. The book is presented as a memoir of the author's days (and nights) of socializing in various bars throughout her life, to this point. I wondered if there would be scenes of bacchanalian debauchery, of friends falling down drunk, of regrettable behavior, and scurrying to repair damage done by drunken episodes the previous night. This book was none of those things, but rather the antithesis of that. I thought it might be difficult to sway me over to believing that she was not just an over-drinker trying to convince her readers that it had all been great fun. Instead, Schaap takes the reader with her into the bars that have been a haven for her, warm, safe places full of friends both familiar and not so familiar. Each bar offered something different in terms of clientele, depending on their location, but ultimately, each establishment offered a sort of home away from home. Bartenders who showed concern when she didn't show up for a few days, patrons who gave her advice, or listened without criticism. As she points out, there is something that happens in these places that ultimately creates a family that accepts you, flaws and all, as they wish to be accepted. Schaap has an intuitive sense of what is important to us, and makes it easy to understand how those needs are met in the extended family of the neighborhood bar. Bad things can happen anywhere and while alcohol is likely to contribute to some rowdy behavior, Schaap never felt safer than she did in any of the bars that she considered to be full of friends. These people watched out for each other, were generous buying rounds or with loans, with kindly advice or friendly joking. She doesn't sugar coat anything, but the book is not intended to be a recitation of people's behavior on a Friday night. It is meant more as an explanation of how she came to discover the great comfort of belonging to a neighborhood bar.
    • 3/5
      I love books about drinking. What attracted to this memoir was there was no one getting sober. This was a book about a woman who drinks regularly and finds that she lands in bars surrounded by more men than women. These bars become her homes away from home and the patrons, her family members.This drew me in and for the first half of the book...I was content with getting this perspective of a regular drinker (and not just someone who has a glass of wine) drinking daily, most often in a bar, and not being an alcoholic.That being said, during the second half I started to get a little bored, particularly with the sidetrack of her introduction to her love of soccer. Although I'm an avid sports fan, it just felt out of place to me in the book and there was a chronological leap between leaving her husband after being in Toronto and then going to while she was still with him that just didn't flow for me. I skimmed the last fifty pages, which is quite unlike me.LOVE the idea of the book...the execution didn't work for me personally.
    • 3/5
      Drinking With Men is a memoir of a real life “Cheers” lifestyle lived by author Rosie Schaap. A native New Yorker, Schaap leads us on an intimate tour of her favorite New York bars and a few in other locals where she has enjoyed status as “a regular”. While telling us stories of the interesting characters she has known and firm friendships she has made, we come to understand that Schaap is a great character in her own right. I hope one day to chance upon the little bar in Brooklyn where she can be found tending bar on Tuesdays day shift and hope there might be an empty bar stool waiting.
    • 4/5
      I wondered if this book would be about a woman that just likes to um, hang out with men in bars. However, I soon realized that she seemed to truly just enjoy the camaraderie of others and the coziness of the traditional neighborhood bar. While I can certainly understand the latter (don't we all have a favorite bar?), it seemed as if the author never grew out of this phase in her life. It also seemed as if she didn't have to do much else with her life. All in all, it was an interesting read, but I could not shake the author's spoiled attitude.
    • 3/5
      Drinking with Men was an interesting read with a stronger beginning than ending. I started to lose interest two-thirds through the memoir and found myself disappointed by the turn of events in the author's life. The best parts of the book are those spent describing the makeshift communities that develop in the local bars frequented by the author, and the characters that inhabit them. I wanted a different ending, perhaps, than the one the author lived, and didn't manage to understand the unraveling of her marriage or her religious conversion, as they seemed to happen so quickly in the back half of the book. That said, I admire the author's honesty and originality in living her life authentically, and enjoyed reading many of the chapters immensely.
    • 3/5
      Drinking with Men is a collection of Schaap's recollections of her favorite drinking holes, beginning as a teenager in New York City and ending, um, in New York, with a notable absence of personal growth in between. Harsh? Maybe. Maybe I'm being especially hard on Schaap because I "get" everything she says about the amazing feeling of fitting in somewhere, somewhere, to quote Cheers, "where everybody knows your name". I've been a girl who loves bars, who enjoyed heated discussions and heart to heart soul dumping over a nice Scotch or pint of ale. I've been "one of the guys" with a lot of the same upsides and downsides that Schaap describes. I learned a lot about people and even more about myself. I made some lifelong friends, some mistakes and missteps, and I MOVED on. I guess that's what I hoped Schaap would do.....and she doesn't. She moves on, to another.....and another....and another bar..where, each time, she builds a new substitute family (a deep need, obviously..she doesn't have much to say about her actual family) spends every night there for months, and then picks up and starts somewhere new. Throughout the whole memoir, she holds down an interesting array of jobs and even marries, but nothing sticks. The individual bars start to sound the same, and I wish she had spent more time showing what sets each, and the characters within, apart. At the end of Drinking with Men, Schaap is bartending, parttime, and starts to make some interesting observations from the other side of the rail...for about two paragraphs, and she's done. YET, when you read her bio on the back, you find out she has plenty going for herself, professionally, as a writer, but nothing really makes it into her memoir that doesn't happen inside the four walls of a bar. Too bad. I think she has more to say....
    • 3/5
      Rosie Schaap grew up in my 'neighborhood'- or at least she got on the train in Westport, Ct. as did I. Between Conn, Vermont and NY City, I'd say we enjoyed the same geographical aesthetics. This is how I knew I would stick with the book no matter what (if nothing else, she was talking about the places I was raised in), and it was actually a decent read. I liked it in a 'medium' kind of way. It's all about hanging out in bars- really, really hanging out-getting to a bar's 'next-level' status, by becoming an actual regular there. I agree with her when she says there is a stigma associated with meeting people in bars. Of coarse this is because people are usually somewhat inebriated in such places, and not everyone 'drinks responsibly' (whatever that is)What was surprising to me was the sporadic mention of alcoholism, or alcohol related mayhem. You would think that logging in all of those hours inside bars she would have seen a lot more in that category. She also seemed to drink a LOT, and it never presented a problem, even though she drank the hard stuff. I wonder if she held things back because she is the New York Times 'Drink' columnist? It's like writing about a cruise, but never mentioning the water. Personally, I've partied hard (and had a blast) and have nothing against drinking whatsoever- it's just that I've witnessed some strange behaviors in inebriated people (and myself), and I don't even hang out at bars. Alcohol is what these rooms revolve around, so it must have been difficult to skirt the (negative side of drinking) issue. She also spoke simultaneously about being so intensely bonded with her bar friends, yet also said that bar relationships were more on the surface. Surface is fine, but for some of us we need the deep bond, so I'm not sure that being a bar regular would be sufficient, personally. To each his or her own, right?Ms. Schaap attended college in Vermont, and was an English Major. I'm not going to veer off into an education discussion for too long, but I became really curious (in my community college way) about why people study the same people over and over again (William Blake, for example, but you could say Robert Frost or any poet who has been dead for at least a hundred years) and write all of these complicated papers about them (after so many years hasn't it all been said?) And it's all theory! Nothing can be substantiated! Maybe Blake wrote that poem because he just did. Why all the pondering about their lives? I realize how absurd that sounds to an English Major, but really: Once anointed, these same people are always in place. Haven't any better (or equal) writers been born since?) Not that I am worthy- but I'd be pissed if people were ruminating incessantly about how I thought, or wrote, like their opinion had any weight. It's so easy to put all your theories onto dead people-they can't argue back. Anyway- I also made connections between Ms. Schaap, who I pictured physically as Janice Soprano (one of my fave characters on that show: ballsy), and mentally like Diane Chambers- particularly when she was staging a Shakespeare play in a New York bar. (She's obviously deeper than the cardboard cut-out character of Diane, but did share a certain sensibility about certain things) Our taste in music could not be any more opposite (Schaap was a dead-head, and from there we veered further) but that has no bearing on my opinion of her book, though I cringed when she started waxing poetic about Bruce Springsteen- a guy I picture way more grabbing a Latte at Starbucks, then working out at the gym before shopping at Barney's than anywhere near the deep dark side of town since forever. Since decades.I liked Ms, Schaap's stories, though I feel she didn't quite convince me why bars are so great. She's naturally more social than I am, but the camaraderie of a Pub or corner bar, lost much of it's luster once I entered my thirties. Even the logistics of drinking and not driving seem hardly worth it, and I have all of the people in my life I need, and the amount of relationships I can sustain and nurture. But there was a time when clubs had their appeal, and it's sure better than being lonely, or fighting against the urge to hang out if that's what you want to do. Live your life,however it feels right, and I always appreciate reading about the roads not taken. Overall, I enjoyed the book, and will add it to my library. I give it three and a half stars.
    • 4/5
      I love a memoir, and I love a cozy bar. But I was a little bit anxious about reading Rosie Schaap's new memoir, Drinking With Men, because I was afraid it would be a memoir of alcoholism and ugly bar encounters. Nope. Not even close. Drinking With Men may be about bars, but it is engaging, gentle, and strangely wholesome. It's a happy-family memoir, only in this case, the family is the cheerfully raffish crew of bar regulars with whom Schaap has made common cause over the years.Schaap devotes a chapter to each bar, and each bar represents - and represents beautifully - a chapter in her life; people encountered, tales told, lessons learned. She's a fine storyteller herself, and her stories are memorable, from the 15-year-old girl trading Tarot readings for beers to her life as "bar chaplain" after 9/11. I felt warmed while reading it and finished the book thinking I would like to share a beer with Rosie Schaap - and just listen to her stories some more.
    • 4/5
      I wasn't sure what to expect when I started reading Rosie Schaap's memoir; I can say that I was pleasantly surprised. It is not so much a story about her drunken exploits (don't get me wrong, there are many), but a story about finding one's identity and the relationships created along the way. Schaap's narration moves along quite well with the exception of a couple of "awkward" transitions later in the book (perhaps final editing will smooth these out). I did have a few questions pop into my head as I read (How can a student afford to drink this much? Am I going to wake up with a residual hangover after reading this??), but, overall, I enjoyed the memoir.
    • 3/5
      Schaap's memoir gives us a glimpse in what it really means to be a regular. Some touching and humorous anecdotes show us how bars aren't simply places where drunkards wallow, or where college kids do shots with ridiculous names, but that can be a community of friends and a respite from everyday troubles. Though the book serves as an often heartwarming apology for bar culture, it's focus might be its major flaw. This book is neither an in depth autobiography nor a narrative focused on a particular time span, but a narrative focused on particular aspect of a life. Being such, the most personal aspects of her life feel like minutia since they are outside of he main context of the narrative. The content can be touching and hilarious, but the format and flow hold back the potential power of Schaap's narrative.
    • 4/5
      I still have not gotten my head around the fact that Rosie Schaap, as she proclaims in the very first sentence of Drinking with Men, has spent more than 13,000 hours of her life inside bars. Think about that number for a minute. That is the equivalent of more eight-hour workdays than most people work in seven years. It equals almost one and a half years of calendar-days doing nothing else. That means that Schaap, who was born in 1971, has spent almost four percent of her entire life inside a bar. Granted, she was a working bartender during some of those hours, but she was a paying customer for way more of the time. Now, it can be argued (and Schaap does an admirable job of building such a case), that all those hours were not entirely wasted, that the benefits gained were worthy of all the time she spent hanging out with likeminded people. Schaap argues that, because she did not have a home environment conducive to creating a feeling of community and family, she had to create her own. So, for the last twenty-five years, she has done just that by bonding with the regulars in the several bars and pubs (mostly, but not exclusively, in New York City) that she came to consider her second-homes. (Consider, too, that Schaap now writes the New York Times “Drink” column – an additional benefit gained.)Schaap was only fifteen when she first drifted into the bar car of a NYC commuter train, but she immediately sensed that she was among her kind of people. These commuters were living the boisterous chain-smoking, booze consuming, dirty-joke-telling lifestyle she instinctively wanted to be a part of. They obviously enjoyed each other’s company and, as she was surprised to learn, they took her more seriously than any adult in her life ever had. Trading tarot card readings for free under-the-table beers, Schaap was soon a regular in her very first barroom. She finally felt that she belonged.Rosie Schaap is a talented writer whose enjoyable prose style makes Drinking with Men an interesting memoir even for readers who might have some difficulty identifying with the lifestyle. I am one of those people, so I appreciate a glimpse into a world I would otherwise have never experienced. I do not doubt that Schaap is a better woman for having experienced the lifestyle firsthand. Having survived her months of following the Grateful Dead from city to city, all the while living on the fly, she finally found the family she needed.This one will, I think, surprise you.
    • 4/5
      This was a pretty great book. As a woman who spent a lot of time in bars in my younger days, I felt like I had found a kindred spirit. So much of the book felt like it was written about me. Especially the late teen years and early twenties. Definitely puts a much better light on the bar scene than most people think. The camaraderie that you can find among your fellow "regulars" is well-portrayed in this book. There were even several spots that brought a tear to my eye! Well done!
    • 4/5
      This isn't a memoir about alcoholism but a memoir of coming of age (several times) and drinking in bars looking for a place and people to call one's own.Rosie Schaap's book should be read with an open mind and heart because if you fail to see how funny, honest, and sweet Schaap is you will mistake her quest to find a place at the bar for a navel-gazing trek around the world and United States.Schapp leaves home a restless, misunderstood, attention-starved teenager to follow the Dead long after the 60's and 70's are over a hippie in the era we normally associate with the rise of Punk and New Wave the 80's.The Deadheads are the first tribe Schaap falls in with and from that point on she finds several more passions (Irish culture, soccer, art) to immerse herself in while atop a bar stool amongst the fascinating mini-communities that thrive in watering holes.
    • 5/5
      One of the very first things you will notice about Drinking with Men is that it is 100% unapologetic. Schaap makes some pretty decent arguments for finding a bar to call your own. Then all of a sudden it hits you, Schaap can really write. She is funny, sarcastic, and above all, a great storyteller. In most cases the introduction to anything is an invitation to yawn. I am not ashamed to say most of the time I skip an introduction. Not this time. Schaap's introduction is almost a warning, as if to say "Hang on because I am about to tell it like it is. I like to drink." and she tells it with such ease that you keep reading and keep reading. You don't realize you have let dinner burn, the cats have moved out and your husband has ordered and finished a pizza all on his own.