In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man - by Tom Junod (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

From two-time National Magazine Award winner Tom Junod, a searching, brilliantly stylized memoir about a charismatic, philandering father who tried to mold his son in his image, the many secrets he hid, the son's obsessive quest to uncover them, and ultimately, the true meaning of manhood

Big Lou Junod dominated every room he entered. He worshipped the sun and the sea, his own bronzed body, Frank Sinatra, and beautiful women. He was a successful traveling handbag salesman who carried himself like a celebrity. He'd return from the road with stories of going to nightclubs where the stars--Ava Gardner, maybe Liz Taylor--"couldn't keep their eyes off . . . your father." He had countless affairs and didn't do much to hide them.

Lou could be cruel to Fran, his wife of fifty-nine years, but he loved his youngest son. Tom was a skin-and-bones, nervous boy, devoted to his mother, but Lou sought to turn him into a version of himself. He showered him with advice about how to dress ("A turtleneck is the most flattering thing a man can wear"), how to be an alpha male, and especially, how to attract and bed women. His parting speech when Tom went to college was: "Do yourself a favor and date a Jewish girl. They're all nymphos." When Tom started seeing his future wife, Janet, Lou's efforts to entice Tom into his version of manhood accelerated on nights in New York, L.A., and Paris.

Tom wrestled with Lou's imposing presence all his life. When one of Lou's mistresses stood up at his funeral and announced, "Can we all . . . just agree . . . that this . . . was a man," Tom set off to learn the facts of his father's life, and why he was the way he was. The stunning secrets he uncovered--about his father, his father's lovers, and deceptions going back generations--staggered Tom, but in the process allowed him, at last, to become his own man, by his own lights.

In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man is an intensely emotional detective story powered by a series of cascading revelations. The book is a triumph of bravura writing; it is a tale of a son reckoning with the consequences of his father's life, and in the end, the story of the son's redemption.

Review Quotes

"Tom Junod has always been a dazzling writer, but in this book he turns his powers on the hardest subject of all--the secrets and lies and complicity at the heart of a family. His family. The result is a sort of shocking detective story, a deeply affecting search for truth, as brave as it is beautiful."
--Ayad Akhtar, author of Homeland Elegies and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama

"What begins as a boy's memory of his philandering father leads to a lineage of ugly truths, lies, and violence that spanned generations. Junod runs headlong toward a haunting dread that he carries the same DNA of reckless men who upended the lives of relatives he loved, relatives he never knew he had, and the hearts of the women those men wooed. His brave and relentless gumshoe reporting uncovered secrets both distressing and cathartic--but allowed him to find a better way to be a man in the painful wake of his forefathers."
--Griffin Dunne, New York Times bestselling author of The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir

"This extraordinary memoir is a fabulous evocation of time lost and time found. It's a Springsteen song with a Proustian theme. Beautifully written, wild and revelatory, it exposes the broken tailfins at the end of the American dream. All the truths and all the lies compose a sad love song that will take your breath away. Junod searches for his father but finds himself, and consequently the rest of us, braided together in the hope that we can rescue something from the broken parts."
--Colum McCann, author of Twist and Let the Great World Spin, winner of the National Book Award

"Tom Junod's long-awaited memoir is a brilliant addition to the literature of fathers and sons, a gorgeously written, unexpectedly suspenseful saga that somehow navigates the agonizing paradox at its core: I am my father's son, Junod declares proudly, and yet I'm also very much not my father's son. The squaring of that paradox--in Junod's reporting, in his heart--makes for a haunting, unforgettable read."
--J.R. Moehringer, New York Times bestselling author of The Tender Bar

"There is no question that Tom Junod has mastered the art of looking outside himself. But here he startles with a propulsive, emotional look inward, an intense examination of his charismatic, maddening father and, ultimately, of himself. The result is deep and brooding, a beautifully rendered portrait of family, masculinity, and what it means to find your own way in the world."
--Susan Orlean, New York Times bestselling author of The Orchid Thief and Joyride

"What a joy it is to see Tom Junod, the best profile writer in the magazine business, bring his style and swing to the ultimate subject: His own father. This is a deceptively impressive accomplishment, because although Lou Junod is a familiar archetype in American life--charismatic, driven by appetites, desperate to be loved--such men are by definition almost impossible to right-size, much less nail down on the page. But Tom Junod has the descriptive powers and emotional vocabulary to do it, capturing both the man who raised him and the women who ultimately saved him from his father's legacy. The result is a memoir of enormous breadth and complexity, a story about shame and pride, moral untidiness and commitment, confusion and--yes--the tangled love of a son for the only father he had."
--Jennifer Senior, New York Times bestselling author of All Joy and No Fun, staff writer at The Atlantic, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing

"In this blistering excavation of a complex, vexing, extraordinary (and extraordinarily flawed) man--his own father--Tom Junod has turned his legendary reporter's lens on his family and its myriad secrets. What does it mean to be a man? Junod shows us that, in the end, it takes in equal parts courage and love. This is a beautiful book."
--Dani Shapiro, New York Times bestselling author of Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity and Love

"Staggering. . . . With an astonishing subject and rare skill, Junod takes a question we all have to its outermost limit: Who are our parents, really? Junod writes that he 'became a writer in order to write this book, ' and that is felt in his steady hand, elegant prose, and dogged, dizzying hunt for every kernel of truth."
--Booklist

About the Author

TOM JUNOD is senior writer for ESPN, where his work has won an Emmy and the Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sportswriting. He is a two-time winner of the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, and a winner of the James Beard Award for essay writing. Previously he was a staff writer at GQ and Esquire. The film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood was based on his article in Esquire. He lives in Atlanta with his wife and daughter.