In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man

“Long known for his award-winning writing about other people, the heralded journalist Tom Junod turns his focus onto his own life and family in this frank and probing memoir. The focus is Junod’s late father, known as Big Lou, who lived large—and loved widely—and did his best to mold his youngest son in his image. Big Lou made a huge impression, albeit maybe not exactly the one he had intended, and here Junod unpacks the love, admiration, confusion, and grief that have become his inheritance.”—Town & Country“The author recreates a lost era of Manhattan nightclubs, Hollywood parties, and tabloid headlines as he pieces together a complex love, beaming a light on today’s masculinity crisis.”—TIME“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“The resulting book, written with both panache and feeling, circles complex truths about Lou and the family that made him the man he was… . An enthralling family memoir and an unromantic commentary on manhood.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)“Junod has a journalist’s eye for detail and a novelist’s mastery of the craft, bringing readers into a gin-soaked, Sinatra-soundtracked midcentury Long Island childhood dominated by a discommoding “man’s man” of a father… This emotionally complex and comprehensive account will become a classic of family memoir… A hauntingly detailed account of generational masculine projection, skillfully told with a journalist’s rigor and a son’s insightfulness.” —Library Journal“Through detailed detective work, including interviews with Lou’s family members, friends, and former lovers, Junod sketches a picture of a complicated, self-absorbed, and surprisingly sweet person, and rigorously unpacks the ways Lou’s charm and overbearing masculinity influenced the man and writer he became… . This is a gripping study of a larger-than-life personality that doubles as a sensitive self-portrait. It’s a winner.” —Publishers Weekly

Tom Junod is a senior writer for ESPN, where his work has earned him 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 has also received the James Beard Award for essay writing. Junod previously served as a staff writer for GQ and Esquire. The film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood was adapted from his article published in Esquire. He resides in Atlanta with his wife and daughter.