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

“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