One of my Mom's favorite books was A Drinking Life: A Memoir by Pete Hamil and I am sorry that I never got around to reading it at the time. I would have liked to have discussed it with Mom. I have read the book now though and here are my thoughts.
A Drinking Life is an important book with interesting things to say about how a young Pete Hamil, born in Brooklyn in a nieghborhood where you did not dream big found the drive to become a legendary newspaper columnist and an author of eleven novels. Pete Hamil clearly loved his mother who encouraged him to folliw his dreams. He loved his father too but as Pete explains his father worked long hours and drank too much when he was home. Also his father, Billy Hamil, didn't understand his son's passions when it came to cartoons and love of books.
As a teenager Hamil got a scholarship to the prestigious Regis High School in Manhattan. He dropped out of Regis at 16, got a job at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and began taking art classes at night. In 1952 at age 17 he joined the Navy and after a few years in the Navy moved to Mexico to study painting. In 1960 at age 25 with a wealth of experience behind him, Pete Hamil started working as a reporter for the New York Post.
A Drinking Life is about drinking of course and how it affected Hamil's early life and the nieghborhood he grew up in. As the novel progresses Hamil's drinking becomes serious and he writes about what finally caused him to quit. The memoir is also about trying to be a cartoonist and then a painter before he became a writer. And in A Drinking Life it's interesting to read about the great comic strips and cartoonists of the era.
Also what stood out for me was Pete Hamil's unwillingness to settle. When at 16 he got a job at the Brooklyn Navy Yard for many that would have been their career path, job security and after 30 years a good pensiion. But as Pete Hamil describes it in his memoir, he wanted more. Throughout his teenage and young adult years he was constantly questioning himself. Is this where I want to be? And if the answer was no he moved on and changed his situation.
As I read A Drinking Life there was parts of it that reminded me of Angela's Ashes but Angela's Ashes is the better book although to be fair very few memoirs can compete with Frank McCourt's memoir about his impoverished Limerick childhood. Pete Hamil is quite honest in his memoir, shockingly so, and he has truths to tell too but the book dragged for me a good part of the way. So instead of A Drinking Life I suggest you try out one of Pete Hamil's novels specifically Snow In August about a ten year old boy growing up in Brooklyn in the 1940's which I can highly recommend.
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