All happy families resemble one another; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. —Tolstoy

I have never read a memoir whose author boasted a happy childhood. So I worry why I am sometimes drawn to the genre. Perhaps my own pretty “normal” upbringing makes me crave stories of lives that were more dramatic and interesting than mine. Or perhaps I am drawn to stories of dysfunctional lives to feel smug about my own dull-but-safe experiences. I hope the reason is neither of these. I hope it’s because memoir offers the chance to see how a person can survive, even be made stronger, by early struggles against negative forces, and how a place and an era affect one’s early life. Then I could believe that I read memoirs for affirmation and inspiration in my own life, not to satisfy a lurking sadistic or voyeuristic streak.

Girls of Tender Age, by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith, is a memoir, not only of an individual life, but also of a time in history: the decade of the 1950s. Through an unusual style and structure, the author makes it clear that the two are interconnected. Glimpses of the attitudes and values of the 1950s are sprinkled through these pages. At first these appear to be nonjudgmental, but they build an increasingly vivid picture of an age of polite façade and passivity, a time when, if you didn’t acknowledge something, then it didn’t exist. Young Mickey suffers not so much from a tragic event in her life as from the attitude toward that event dictated by the silence of the ’50s.

The first half of the book describes Mickey’s childhood growing up in blue collar neighborhoods in Hartford, Connecticut, complete with trips to G. Fox. (Anyone who grew up in Connecticut in the ’50s, this author included, will remember a visit to Fox’s.) Mickey’s immediate family is dysfunctional. Her mother is constantly on the verge of a nervous breakdown; “all women in the ’50s were either having one or on the verge.” Her brother is autistic, “in a time when no one knew what autism was.” Tyler cannot bear noises and so the family, “all half-mad,” literally and metaphorically tiptoe around him. Mickey’s father is a thrall to the care of his son, and she can grab only brief snatches of his attention and love.

Mickey is full of innocence and ignorance. Nowhere is this more apparent than in her descriptions of her Catholic upbringing. She is sure that allowing the communion wafer to touch her teeth will send her straight to hell. In talking about the Christmas pageant she remarks, “None of us knew what an inn was, except that there was never any room.” Not pretty enough to be the Virgin Mary, Mickey is one of the Heavenly Hosts, which she assumes is short for “hostesses,” presumably working at that inn. When a cousin dies, Mickey assumes that it was her fault. None of these misperceptions is addressed, because there is no conversation about them; children are supposed to “absorb” truths. What saves Mickey and “transports her out of the bedlam” that is her home, is a large extended family (whose pictures appear throughout the book), school, and the neighborhood kids. But none of these can protect Mickey from the ever-increasing evil which moves relentlessly closer in time and place. The style reflects the imminence of tragedy by devoting more and more description of it in alternating chapters. Finally, it intrudes into Mickey’s life when she is in fifth grade. After that, nothing is the same.

The second part of the book shows an adult Mary meticulously searching for information about the tragedy that shook her life. Mickey could remember nothing about the two and a half years that followed the event. “We are not to mention it,” she was told and so she repressed it. Now, Mary must uncover what happened in those two and a half years so that she can complete the picture of herself. She must also break the silence about the event in order to properly honor its victim. I found this part of the book less compelling, though I see why the author had to write it the way she did. In the last part of the book, Mary, now free from the silence of those years, goes on to tell the rest of her story.

Mickey is a vulnerable, sensitive, and very funny protagonist in a memoir that shows the great extent to which we are products of the times in which we are born and grow up. I enjoyed identifying with the author’s memories of the ’50s and interested to think about my own life and the extent to which it, too, was shaped by the silence of that decade.

In J. R. Moehringer’s The Tender Bar, it is a place, rather than an era, that molds the young JR. Dickens is a local bar in Manhasset, Long Island, where JR’s Uncle Charlie works. It is this place that becomes a haven for the young boy, and it is the bar’s male “regulars” that shape his life until that moment of realization that allows him to escape them.

JR lives with his mother at Grandpa’s house, a dilapidated structure that houses not only them and the grandparents, but also Uncle Charlie and Aunt Ruth and her six children. It is an ugly, noisy place, with “furniture held together by duct tape” and “a round-the-clock din of cursing, crying and fighting.” JR’s father’s “one true genius was disappearing” and to the young boy his only presence is the “Voice” on the radio to which he listens, longing for the man behind it. When JR is about 8, the Voice telephones and tells his son to be ready the next day to go to a ball game. The boy waits in the driveway as hour after hour goes by and his father never comes. J. R. are the initials of his father’s name but JR refuses this namesake and insists the two letters are his real name; he then searches for an identity to fill that name.

JR grows up in the midst of hard-drinking, physically active men who become his surrogate fathers, but he never stops looking for his real father. He takes his mother’s love for granted and though he loves her, he is too busy looking for his father to be sensitive to her influence. Through Yale, a first love, and a job at the New York Times, JR deals with conflicting impulses and returns again and again to the bar to be soothed by liquor and the presence of the men. (If you are susceptible to the power of suggestion, watch out; you could get very drunk in the course of this book!) It takes hitting bottom for JR to realize the truth about his identity.

The book is long and drags in parts, but the power of the final chapter excuses its earlier faults. For readers familiar with Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, this book will have another level of meaning. One notices the specific allusions to Gatsby, then the parallels in events and characters, and ultimately an echo of themes. In the end JR, like Gatsby, has to give up his illusions.

Both Mickey and JR are “tender.” Their vulnerability and the circumstances of time and place allow others to shape their characters. But their ultimate triumphs are both affirming and inspiring.