Pub Day: Tom Junod, IN THE DAYS OF MY YOUTH I WAS TOLD WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A MAN

A stunning family saga from one of America's best writers

Photo by Lee Crum

Welcome back to our Pub Day series, where I feature new books from friends and colleagues on their publication day. Today I’m honored to share a conversation with Tom Junod about his book IN THE DAYS OF MY YOUTH I WAS TOLD WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A MAN, which I feel sure will be one of the most talked-about books of the year.

(If that title sounds familiar, by the way, it’s the first line of Led Zeppelin’s “Good Times, Bad Times,” which itself could serve as the title of most great books, including this one.)

In the journalism world I live in—the world that values longform storytelling—Tom is our LeBron, our Tiger Woods. His work for GQ and ESPN, and especially his work for Esquire, expanded the boundaries for what a magazine story could be. If you’ve never read his story on the falling man of 9/11, or his profile of Mister Rogers that became the Tom Hanks movie, or any of three dozen other stories I could name … well, you’ve missed out on some of the greatest pieces of our lifetimes.

Tom lives in Atlanta, and I met him through some mutual friends 10 or 12 years ago. He was kind enough to do an event with me in Atlanta when THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM came out in 2019. I noticed, as we were up on stage, that many of the women in the room looked at Tom the way that schoolgirl looks at Indiana Jones in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. Tom is a handsome man and he knows how to dress. Those are two of the many things he inherited from his father.

From the time I first met Tom, he was telling me about the book he was trying to write about his father, Lou. His dad had style, he was a magnet at parties, he looked like a movie star—and he constantly, obsessively, brazenly cheated on his wife. Tom grew up mesmerized by his dad and terrified of him at the same time. And every secret he learned made his dad’s complications even darker.

The book finally became not just Lou’s story, but the story of Lou and Tom, and what the son learned from the father—to his credit and his shame. You will empathize with Tom as you read this book, but you might not completely like him. He has secrets, too, and he has his own obsession—learning the whole truth about his father, no matter what it takes.

This book floored me. I’ve never read a memoir like it. It’s a tremendous feat of investigation—Tom chases down his father’s lovers and friends and family members all over the country. The story he builds from those conversations, and from his own memories, is deeply specific—but also universal to anyone who has struggled with a family member’s overwhelming gravitational pull.

I can’t recommend this book highly enough.

Tom graciously answered a few questions about it.

1. When we first talked about this book years ago, it was a more straightforward biography of your dad. It evolved into something different—more of a memoir, I’d say, seen through the prism of your relationship with him. What led to that change?

It was always a memoir, in the purest sense—I knew from the start that I would be doing a great deal of writing from memory. But you’re right, about the difference between the book I started writing and the book I finished. In the beginning, I didn’t really have a plan, an approach, or even a voice. I just started writing about my father as much as I could, hoping those three essentials would somehow pay me a visit as a reward for my grinding productivity.

I wrote something like 230,000 words that way, until I took a leave from ESPN in order to finish the book at the end of 2019. I soon realized that not only was I not close to finishing; I had not even started writing about some of the principal characters of the book. I was on schedule to write a million-word memoir, which only sounds impressive— it’s actually a complete failure. So I ditched it, and tried to start over.

The great difference came when I handed the microphone, the camera, the pen, the POV, all of it, to the little boy who was helpless in the face of Lou Junod’s awesome power. I wrote a section about the sound of his crackling ankles waking me up in the morning, and somehow managed to conjure up the innocence and love and fear of a long-ago version of myself. I never let that go, and everything I was missing in the first draft came to me.

There are three “books” that comprise “In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man”: the first is pure memoir, the second the story of my father’s decline, the third an investigation of my father and my family. But the entire book, even when it’s investigative, never loses what I gained from the crack of his ankles: the story of a father and son locked in love and combat, on eternally unequal terms.

2. You spoke to dozens of family members and others in your dad’s circle—some of whom you’ve known your whole life and others you met for the first time. Which of those encounters have lingered with you the most?

The women.

I had been investigating my father since I was a boy—snooping around his closet, his drawers, even the pockets of his suits. I had always been suspicious of him, and I do mean “always”: when I was three years old he had an affair with the mother of my first childhood friend, and I somehow knew about it, from the pain it caused my Mom. I used to have hunches about him, and then set out to find if they were right. They always were.

I knew a lot about my Dad. But when I began working on the book, I set out to find the people who knew him, well, intimately. I wound up talking to the woman who showed up at his memorial service, asking the audience: “Can we all...just agree...that this....was a man?” I wound up talking to my Aunt Ceil, who was my mother’s confidant, and confirmed once and for all that Mom was well aware of who my Dad was. I wound up speaking to my Aunt Ellie, who prided herself on not buying her brother’s bullshit. I wound up talking to the best friend of the woman who was the love of my father’s life and died tragically in the Seventies. And I spoke to the woman who had the affair with my father when I was three.

These were the most difficult and uncompromising interviews I’ve ever done, and also the most gratifying. I simply didn’t take “no” for an answer, though the women, in most cases, were elderly, and were shocked that the son of a man whom they knew when they were much younger had come to their door with questions about him and about them. And what I found out was that he might have been able to fool men. He might have been able to charm and seduce women. But the women knew him in ways I didn’t—in ways I could only imagine and, in fact, had always imagined. They knew him in bed, and spoke of him in sometimes graphic terms. They knew that he talked about his children even when he was squiring them around New York City. They knew he was capable of kindness, just not to my Mom. They spoke of him with fondness but never with anything close to credulity. Their memories of him never let him get away with anything.

To give you an example: The woman who had the affair with my father when I was three was named Valerie. I went to her home in the California desert, and dug in my heels until she told me what I needed to know. The encounter started contentiously. But finally she said, “All right, I’m not going to lie to you,” and everything changed. I asked her what my Dad was like. She said, “He was the kind of man who sang...in clubs.”

“You heard him sing?”

“I heard him sing.”

“Was he a good singer?”

“He was a good singer. In a club.”

You ask what stayed with me. That stayed with me.

3. When do you find yourself acting most like your dad?

I am most like my Dad when I walk into a crowded room, and check to see if I’ve turned any heads. I am most like my Dad when I use the old-fashioned manners he taught me. I am most like my Dad when I wear a turtleneck. I am most like my Dad when I wear his cufflinks. I am most like my Dad when I dive into the ocean and break the surface with the sun pouring light down on the water and experience a moment of pure pagan joy. I am most like my Dad when I imitate his...voice, the melody of pause and emphasis that set him apart from any human being I’ve ever known. I am most like my Dad when I don’t forget a slight. And, alas, I am most like my Dad when I feel unlucky.

I do not consider myself unlucky, by the way. I am one of the luckiest men on the planet. But my Dad, in the last twenty or so years of his life, made a fetish of his misfortune. When he suffered a disappointment or setback, he made it sound as though a unique and individualized set of circumstances had conspired against him—“my mazel,“ he would say.

He told me, “Never lose your confidence, son—because once it goes, it’s like your hair. It’s never coming back.” But what I learned from him was the danger of romanticizing failure.

It is something I resist, and have to resist, with all my might.

4. Your dad embodied a type of masculinity that feels fairly common to his time—the idea that men were entitled to take as many lovers as they wanted, regardless of any family back home. What we consider “toxic masculinity” these days is almost the opposite—young incels filled with rage because they can’t find romantic partners, or don’t know how. What has changed? And do you see any common ground between those two types of men?

My father thought of masculinity as a skill set, and was eager to impart those skills to me by way of the maxims he espoused. Oh, there are so many—from “always wear white … to the face” to “make sure you clean your navel” to “don’t bullshit a bullshitter” to “make sure you date a Jewish girl—they’re all nymphos.” They were outlandish, but then, so was he. And I’m glad I learned them, because in some way I still live by them. “Always look a man in the eye,” he said, and I do. “Always have a firm handshake,” he said. I do that too.

I often think of him when I encounter young men today, many of whom lack those basic skills that my father thought so essential, and so lack the clarity that came with them. I might as well just say it: It is impossible to fulfill the masculine ideal when you’re staring at your phone. You can’t engage with other people when you’re staring at your phone, and it’s in your engagement with other people that the masculine skill set comes to the fore. My brother Michael is ten years older than I am, and when my daughter Nia started dating, he gave her this advice: “If your date doesn’t come around and open the car door for you, drop him!”

That’s straight from our father.

This is not to say I offer Lou Junod as the personification of the masculine ideal. I know too much about him. I know all the ways he betrayed the principles he espoused, and I know how many people he hurt. He could be a destructive man. And so here’s the question I ask about him: was he, or was he not, an honorable one?

I never use the phrase “toxic masculinity” in my book, or anywhere else, for that matter. But I am aware of the so-called manosphere, which to me is the product of an ethos that has emerged not from the fulfillment of the masculine ideal but from its ruins. Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel—young men admire them because of what they are able to get away with. But getting away with bad behavior has nothing to do with the masculine ideal, because it’s dishonorable. And honor is what’s missing in the manosphere. It was what was what was missing in a lot of my Dad’s excesses. And I can say with great certainty: he didn’t get away with it.

5. Did you love your father? Do you love your father?

I feared my father and loved him in equal measure. When I was young, I could barely be in the same room with him without tears. When I grew up, I realized how ridiculous he was, and he became the funniest man I ever met. No one made me laugh like my Dad. The laughter chased some of the fear away, and let me love him. We were very close, despite my knowing so many of his secrets, a knowledge I’ve never divulged until now. When my brother called me at 12:30 in the morning on September 17, 2006, and said, “He’s gone,” I hit the floor, my eyes rolling in my head. There was the world with my father in it and the world without. It was—and I guess is—the great divide.

Do I still love him? Yes. But of course the book has done a bunch of things more or less simultaneously: It de-romanticized him. It exposed him. It helped me understand him. It did everything but set me free of him, and yet lately, perhaps because he hasn’t gone away, it has permitted me, at long last, to be angry at him.

I felt so weak around him, as a boy, that I spent a lot of my adult life trying to find the strength to face up to him as a man. I think I’ve done that. I think I’m able to love my Dad, despite what I know, because I can finally deal with him from a position of strength. It’s a good thing.

I think his relationship with me is following the same uncharted course, with the same ups and downs. I can say this because he still comes rather often to me in my dreams. Sometimes he’s loving, sometime he’s hurt, sometimes he’s so angry he’s regained some of this threatening power.

But I’m happy to see him, every time. You see, I miss him. I’ll take him however I can get him.

Bonus question: Here’s one I have a personal interest in ... You go by Tom, but you told me one time that the moment you step foot back home on Long Island, you’re a Tommy. What differences have you noticed between being a Tom and being a Tommy?

Tommy is the kid who was scared of his Dad. Tommy is both a scrapper and a bully. Tommy has skinned knees and untied shoelaces. Tommy spends every day of high school stoned to the gills. Tommy is a handbag salesman who almost gets executed in his hotel room. I enjoy being called Tommy because, in my mind, I’m so different from him now, and it’s something of a relief to be able to become him again—and also because people still underestimate Tommy. They still think he’s like everyone else. They don’t know he’s a writer, and is about to publish a book, under the name of Tom Junod.

***

You can buy Tom’s book pretty much anywhere books are sold … a few links:

Bookshop (you can choose which independent bookstore you want to use)

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

If you want to read more about Tom, here’s a story about him in Esquire, the magazine he used to work for.

And here’s a long YouTube interview that goes deep into how Tom does his work.

—TT

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