Drinks with Nick

What goes into a drink?  Booze, naturally, unless you want a non-alcoholic cocktail - like customers who belly up to the bar and ask for a virgin Bloody Mary, a drink bartenders call a Bloody Shame for obvious reasons. But it's the choosing of the booze that can make a drink sing, so choose carefully.  To commemorate Matthew Thomas's remarkable debut, We Are Not Ourselves, I took my cue from the father of Eileen Tumulty, the character you'll follow from her girlhood in the 1940's all through her tumultuous life - a life colored by the times she grows up in, certainly, but colored even more by the neighborhoods she'll call home, by the friends and acquaintances she'll meet along the way.

Her father, Big Mike?  He's loud.  Charismatic and dynamic.  And even though he cuts a brash, dangerous figure, "When he drank whiskey....the leash came off," he's also responsible for some of the most touching scenes in the book...