I tried instead to organize The Tender Bar around the more answerable question: Who are we? I tried to explore ideas of community, to portray, in Auden’s phrase, the “faces along the bar,” and the faces around my grandfather’s dinner table, and the faces on the Yale campus, and the faces up and down Plandome Road, the main street of my hometown, Manhasset, New York. Whoever I was, those faces made me, saved me; whenever I looked over my shoulder, peered into the darkness of my youth, I saw them shining brightly, and it made me ache with love.
