Girl Walks into a Bar: A Memoir by Strawberry Saroyan, Saroyan

From the Publisher

"Girl Walks Into a Bar explores Saroyan's struggle not only with who she is and who she wants to be but also with who she is in the context of what she's supposed to embody: the iconic, media-promulgated "girl," a twenty-first-century version of Audrey Hepburn standing outside Tiffany's looking at diamonds." Girl Walk Into a Bar takes a handful of the most striking and formative episodes of Saroyan's life and brings them to the pages as a filmmaker might, zooming in on the crucial "scenes": Saroyan losing her virginity, starting her own riot-grrrly magazine, falling in dysfunctional love. Yet all the while she's trailed by that other black-clad girl, the Platonic ideal of so many modern young women's fantasies. Will the two ever meet? That question lies at the heart of Saroyan's genre-bending memoir.

The Los Angeles Times

A thousand jokes have started with the line "a guy walks into a bar," but Strawberry Saroyan's memoir of her 20s (which correspond to the 1990s) in New York and Los Angeles, except for a few rueful asides, isn't funny. It's a painfully earnest account of what it's like to be a young woman in a "postfeminist" era in which having the freedom to choose careers and lifestyles is taken for granted but in which this very freedom makes choices difficult. — Michael Harris

Publishers Weekly

The life of a young media striver (she's William Saroyan's granddaughter) overflows with brushes with greatness, aborted romances, glamour, doubt and expensive mixed drinks. In Saroyan's Sex in the City-style memoir, she explores her life as a determined 20-something in New York City, enthralled with and then repelled by her own aspirations. Soon after landing a job at Cond Nast Traveler, she becomes disenchanted with the glossy magazine world of which she had so badly wanted to be a part. Saroyan returns to Los Angeles, where she grew up, having "burned out" on the hyper-ambitious lifestyle of New York media by age 25. In L.A., she continues to struggle with the image of success she's created for herself and dabbles in a series of complicated relationships. At times, Saroyan (who is now in her early 30s) gets bogged down by the minutiae of her travails. However, she writes with ease and acuity about personal disappointments and dangerous love interests, putting into words what often goes unsaid about success and its relation to our private lives. After an article she writes for the New York Times Magazine is abruptly dropped, she asks, "Why do we feel like we're going to lose everything personally if we fail professionally?" At this book's heart is the symbiotic relationship between personal and professional expectations. Saroyan's story will no doubt resonate for many, whether they're currently struggling in their careers or are in a position to reflect on the bumpy road that got them where they are. Agent, Andrew Wylie. (On sale July 8) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

When California native Saroyan learns that her wealthy grandmother will no longer pay her tuition she earns a scholarship to another small liberal arts college, Barnard in New York City, convinced that she must make something of her life. Since her grandmother has ceased supporting her freelance artist parents and brother and sister in drug rehabilitation, Saroyan has become the hope of her family. This new goal energizes her, and she graduates from college and soon lands a publishing job at a Cond Nast magazine. Looking for additional challenge, she and friend Sarah, still in their mid-twenties, found a periodical of their own, Bleach. Despite career success and a social life with Manhattan's young publishing elite, she feels dissatisfied and moves back to the more relaxed atmosphere of Los Angeles. While Saroyan, a freelance writer (Salon, Elle, and Interview magazines), employs an intriguing style, featuring episodes from her life in nonlinear sequence, the book lacks depth and individuality. Her experiences with friendship, falling in love, and the ever present bar and drug scene fail to ignite and instead provide lengthy introspection into a not very unusual coming of age. Not recommended.-Nancy R. Ives, State Univ. of New York, Geneseo Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal

Adult/High School-In the 1990s, when the author's grandmother no longer paid for her college tuition, Saroyan won a scholarship to Barnard. This feat seemed relatively pedestrian to her. In fact, Saroyan's life was outside the norms of most 20-somethings. The granddaughter and daughter, respectively, of writers William and Aram Saroyan, the author doesn't identify her celebrity relatives, as those facts are unimportant in this book. Between her artistic parents, who barely made ends meet, and her drug-addicted siblings, she struggled with the pressures of her family, but, more significantly, her own burden to redeem its honor somehow. The book is a series of quests and adventures, through relationships and romance, academic and professional life. Saroyan has the gift to find the profound in the ebb and flow of growing up. She addresses the perennial question: "Who am I and what do I want to be?" Teens will readily appreciate and understand the ongoing process of "becoming" all the while feeling as though there should be closure somewhere, somehow. In a market flooded with superficial and supercilious "chick lit" books, this is a very special autobiography.-Jane Halsall, McHenry Public Library District, IL Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Excruciatingly self-absorbed, often trite memoir of life lessons learned in the author's 20s. Evoking the 1990s and a generation's angst, Saroyan describes herself and her peers, privileged, ambitious young men and women who regarded success as a right but found attaining it either disappointing or daunting. For Saroyan and her friends, bars were their testing grounds, "places where I have grown up and experimented with who I've wanted to be." In separate chapters, more essays than narratives, she revisits the bars she frequented: "Hotel bars in New York . . . old and authentic-recently renovated ones in L.A., with white chairs and expensive skylights." At them she drank, danced, and sometimes fell in love, though she was a late developer sexually; the book's first essay recalls her fears about her virginity, which she didn't lose until she was 25. She had moved to California from New York because in Manhattan she felt unhappy with her life, though as related here it doesn't sound too bad. After graduating from Barnard, Saroyan worked at a number of glossy periodicals and was a founding editor of Bleach, a "post-Madonna Magazine for Women" whose conception she details in a chapter titled "Ambition." She wanted to be more fully engaged with the world, the author writes, less trapped by the values of celebrity she found in New York. (The author is no stranger to celebrities, being the granddaughter of playwright William Saroyan and step-granddaughter of actor Walter Matthau, both coyly unnamed here.) In LA, Saroyan initially hung out at the Bounty, a bar filled with aging boys removed from reality. She then joined a group of writers and actors who met every Thursday night for encountersthat form the most satisfying passages here and, in her portrait, help her grow up and understand the past. Sometimes finely crafted prose only slightly leavens the atmosphere of suffocating narcissism.

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twelfth, between a & b
It’s hard to say when my virginity became something that I wanted to lose. At eighteen, I remember, I couldn’t have cared less about it. I was waiting for love, and when my blond surfer date asked me so sweetly one night to stay over in his dorm room, I had no trouble saying no. Maybe in a few weeks, if we were in love, I would tease him—then I would, perhaps, but not now, no way, sorry honey, I would say.
But the surfer and I didn’t last that long and, over the years, no one else seemed to either. My know-how in the dating department ended after round one: I had no problem choosing a guy I liked and silently, almost magically, seducing him into holding my hand and kissing me and making out with me at a party or in the woods or in my bed. But I could take it no further. The next day, I would feel ashamed and embarrassed by my behavior. “What was I thinking last night? My God, I was really drunk,” I would say to my friends and laugh, trying to sound as though it didn’t matter. The next time I saw the guy, I would act as if nothing had happened, act tough and untouchable.
Inside, I would simply feel a blackness, an emptiness that seemed so big it was impossible to get through. The few times I had tried to explore it, I’d stopped when I’d started to feel like I was drowning. I was, quite simply, terrified. My terror wasn’t so much of sex per se (although that was part of it) but, I think now, more of the sensation of not knowing what I was getting into with these guys, of confusion itself. And during this time, these years, I believed that the ones who didn’t call or try to see meagain, I liked, and the ones who liked me, I didn’t. It was funny how it always seemed to happen that way and it was also somehow a horrible relief.
So I came to be, at twenty-five, still a virgin. While my friends had been having their first relationships, if not yet their first loves, I had spent my late teens and early twenties retreating into a series of infatuations. These infatuations demanded little of me, yet they supplied me with an endless well of feelings to draw upon at any time. I would spend months upon months in a safe cocoon of thoughts about someone I might have spent only one (chaste) night with, or gone out with just two or three times. I could pull these men, and the little things I remembered about them, out like cards at opportune moments, when I needed a pick-me-up or felt like a dash of emotion. The way he used to flick his hair, the way he used to say my name, the way he used to kiss me; I would replay these details over and over, and live on them, use them as touchstones to brighten up my day in a bittersweet way.
I spoke to two or three girlfriends about my virginity, but otherwise no one knew my secret. To most people, I was just another sophisticated young Manhattanite, drinking my gin and tonics and reading my Mary McCarthy and perfecting my ice-cool take on the world. But I was beginning to feel left out. The friends whom I did tell didn’t seem to understand my problem. Why didn’t I simply go out and sleep with someone? they would ask, vaguely patronizing me, I thought. After all, guys will sleep with anyone, it’s not that hard to get them into bed, and I was attractive and smart, anyway, they would say. One night I had finally tried to just go out and do it, but I couldn’t figure out quite how to broach the topic with the male friend whom I had hesitantly selected to be my “first.” I was too shy to propose that we just go back to his place and go to bed together. But it was also more than that: I felt paralyzed to help myself out of this problem, for reasons I could not, and still do not, particularly understand. Because not having sex was never about religion or morality for me, although at first it was a little bit about love. But even that, at a certain point, fell by the wayside.
So it’s hard to say exactly when it happened, but gradually my virginity became an important entity in my life. It began to dictate my decisions, to distort my sense of myself, and, in the end, to become a constant, droning, hopeless backdrop against which everything else occurred. And it became all of these things in the form of a voice, a voice that said I was never going to have sex because there was something fatally flawed in me and that I might as well just face it.
During the five years I lived in New York, I dated maybe ten men in all. Most of the time, I was not particularly unhappy about this. I thought that I didn’t go out with that many men because I knew what I wanted. For the life of me now, however, I cannot recall exactly what that was. I can say that I had a vague fantasy about being part of a media “power couple” (I was starting out as a journalist), and that my ideal mix included fame, money, and eccentricity. I also liked womanizers, because they made it easy for me. I was nervous, and their often outrageous come-ons both distracted me and let me off the hook from having to initiate anything. My only job was to say no.
I could go on about the men I met who measured up to some or all of my fantasy, but the truth is that the minutiae of many of my encounters aren’t that interesting. Most of them start to seem the same in retrospect, even to me, although when they were taking place each word, each look weighed heavily. That is what makes them seem the same, in the end: They were all too important.
I think the more interesting story, the real story, is what was happening to me without them, or without someone, in my life. These were the years between twenty and twenty-five for me, and they coincided with the years that I lived in New York City, and the years in which I began to grow up.
One afternoon, during the first term of my sophomore year at a small liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon, I got a call from my father. He’d had a fight with my grandmother, he said, and subsequently received a letter from her saying that she would no longer be paying for my college education, and that none of us were to contact her.
I’d always suspected rejection might be just around the corner with my grandmother, from the days that I had gone as a hippie child to visit her in her big house in Los Angeles and driven around with her in her Rolls-Royce. I had always felt that somehow my family and I never quite measured up to her expectations or quite fit into her life, and what my father told me on the phone that day seemed proof of this. As we talked, I felt numb, and then panicked. The financial implications of this fight were real and immediate; I had just a few thousand dollars of my own in savings, and my parents were both freelance artists with little money.
Over the next several days, however, I came up with a plan. I would have to transfer to a better college (no one would be there to catch my fall anymore, I realized, and I needed to get a degree that would mean something to the outside world), I would have to get a sizable scholarship to attend this new college, and, in order to do that, I would need to get straight A’s for the rest of the year. I decided that I would transfer to a school in New York City. I am not entirely sure why I chose New York, but having just come back from a term “abroad” there, it occurs to me that being in the eye of this crisis may have subconsciously reminded me of being in the city. Manhattan is, after all, the only place I know of that moves at the speed of panic.
So I escaped my emotional predicament for the rest of the academic year by working nonstop. I had just gotten my first journalism assignment and I added that to my full course load, which I attacked with a zeal bordering on compulsion. I began to brew a strong pot of coffee for myself every night at midnight, and to drink it all to keep myself going until around two. I started running every day, and recall one evening after I’d been working out for over an hour, a friend of mine remarked with concern that I looked white as a sheet. I stopped fooling around with men because I didn’t have the time. In April, I was accepted by Barnard for the following fall, and received better financial aid than I had dared to hope for.
I arrived in Manhattan one hot September day in 1990. It is hard to describe what a relief the city was to me then. The noise, the activity, the skyscrapers, the concrete—it all felt oddly natural, and it made me happy for the first time in what seemed like years. I was suspicious of the happiness, though, because it had been so long since I’d felt anything like it. I confided to several friends that I thought I might get run over by a car because things were finally going well for me.
Things were not going so well for the rest of my family, though, and during my first months in the city, I felt under increasing pressure to succeed on their behalf as well as mine. Recently, my parents had both had to get regular jobs for the first time in their lives, and they’d started at the bottom. My mother had begun working in retail at the local suburban mall, and my father, among other things, was driving an airport van. That summer, my brother and sister, both younger, had been admitted to a drug rehab hospital for teenagers. They remained there as I began my first term at Barnard. I felt, as I remarked to a friend as we sat on the steps at Columbia one afternoon, that I was the “hope of the family.”
I spent the bulk of my time at Barnard either in class or studying in my dorm room. Working hard there felt more like a game than a chore to me, though, and for the most part I enjoyed myself. I had always been a good student, but never before had I been around so many other people who were also high achievers. I saw myself in my fellow students and it made me aware of my own worth, gave me a sense of momentum and pride that I had never experienced before. I was happy, and safe, in my little world.