I don’t know about you, but I belong to a raucous book club.  We read the book – we’re not like the women on TV shows, who, ha ha ha, forget the book and just drink wine  – but we are so raucous that it is difficult to find a good venue.  Although we have not actually been kicked out anywhere, we need a LARGE coffeehouse or restaurant, where we can sit at a remote table and not disturb the other people. 

We live in Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and Nebraska. Where’s the central point? Who knows?   We don’t meet often, but we always pick a town somewhere off  I-80 or I-35. Friends in central Iowa insist, “You have to meet in Iowa City.”  Iowa City is a UNESCO City of Literature, and Pages from a Cold Island, our book club pick, was set partly in Iowa City. So one evening we met at The Mill, the famous bar where Writers’ Workshop classes reputedly used to meet.  If anyone were too raucous, we figured, it would be workshop students guzzling beer and noisily critiquing one another’s stories.  

And so we tromped into the bar and sat in what seemed to be a church pew.  We ordered pizza and a couple of pitchers of Diet Coke.  “We don’t have pitchers of Diet Coke.”   We got the pitchers, because the employees, mostly college students, are unused to dealing with middle-aged and older crones. In fact, we don’t exist, which was an advantage: they gave us the pitcher gratis.

On this particular evening, we had a raucous discussion of the writer Frederick Exley’s auto-fiction.  In his second novel, Pages from a Cold Island, published in 1974, he includes a description of his interview with Gloria Steinem, which goes awry after his demanding, follow-up, fact-checking phone calls.  After he writes up the interview,  he sobers up long enough to teach for a semester at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in Iowa City.  But the talented workshop students turn out to be such brutal critics of each other’s work that he dreads the mayhem.  He spends most of his free time drinking at Donnelly’s, a bar for hardcore alcoholics, and the Deadwood, frequented by his new friends, the Epstein brothers, who owned a bookshop.

Anyway, The Mill – which, I believe, has since closed – was suitably raucous, but we didn’t like the pizza.  What can I say?  If you’re at a bar, you need good pizza.    And it was rowdy beyond our expectations. We weren’t particularly thrilled when a guy with a chest tattoo took off his shirt and drunkenly explained the tattoo’s genesis. Oversharing, we agreed.

Anyway, enough of Iowa City, which has only two bookshops left, alas. Next time we’ll go to a coffeehouse in Omaha, which is actually a very cool city.