In his new memoir, In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man, Tom Junod reckons with the myth and reality of his father, a man whose presence shaped everything, even in what went unsaid. In this conversation, he discusses masculinity, memory, and the challenge of telling the truth without losing the complexity of love.
I caught up with Junod via email to discuss fatherhood, performance, and the tension between who we remember and who we understand.
Al-Lateef Farmer: In August Wilson’s Fences, Rose talks about Troy having a “shadow” in the house that was “big”, something unspoken, shaping everyone around him. As you wrote this book, did you come to understand your father as someone who carried a similar kind of presence, and how did you find language for something that was always there but not always named?
Tom Junod: My father, Lou Junod, was known as Big Lou, so it’s not that the immensity of his presence — and his shadow — was a fact unspoken. It’s that he cast two different kinds of shadows, and while we could talk about his public life, we couldn’t talk about his secret one. People loved telling stories about my father. I loved hearing stories about my father. But I knew about his secret life, and, of course, had to bear that knowledge alone. So your question about finding the language that was there but not always named touches on the central challenge of the book. I mean, I wrote about my father any number of times before setting about to write “In The Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man.” But I certainly didn’t write everything I knew. Turtlenecks? Sure. Wearing “white to the face”? Of course. But finding his briefcase full of pornography and sex toys? That was a lot harder, because my father cast a spell, and I didn’t want to break it. What I finally settled on was the necessity of remembering not just who he was, but also who I was — the little boy, the child, lovestruck, awestruck, terrified, powerless, and yet determined to find out who this man really was. That little boy was always there, you see. He’s with me now.
ALF: What kind of bravery did it take to tell this story the way it needed to be told, and were there moments you almost chose not to?
TJ: I’m not sure if it required bravery at all. But there was definitely a moment when I chose to write the book, and there was definitely a moment when I despaired of having the ability to see it through. That was in early 2020. I was five years in. I had taken a leave from ESPN to finish. I had written a lot, written endlessly. And I had a lot of words — 230,000 of them — but that’s all. So I tossed them, and started over. I wonder now if the abandonment of the draft required more courage than the starting over. I wasn’t brave, so much as I was desperate. But, as I wrote in my previous answer, my desperation forced me to visit the version of myself who, even as a little kid, had to find everything out. He was the brave one, not me.
ALF: Do you see masculinity, especially in your father’s generation, as something men performed for others more than something they lived honestly for themselves?
TJ: My father was always performing. The way he spoke, the way he sang, the way he dressed, the way he transformed himself — he was always putting on a show. The real question is his audience. Was he performing for women? Yes, very much so. Was he performing for his family? Yes, alas. But your question raises the possibility that he was also performing for other men, and I think that’s also very much true. My father made manhood — masculinity itself — intoxicating. Not just for his women, not just for us, but for the men who worshipped, envied, and, in the end, covered for him. But he would never have admitted this, and I doubt if he did any of it consciously. He would never have told you he was performing, unless he was at a microphone, crooning “Embraceable You.” He would never have said he was a man of his generation. He would have said he was one of a kind…Lou Junod.
ALF: How did the process of writing this book reshape your understanding of your family and the circumstances that shaped your father? What surprised you most in what you uncovered?
TJ: I knew a lot of things about my father when I started — a lot of unsavory things. But the book required me not only to go to my past, but also his past, and so it required a lot of research and investigation. And what I found out was that sex had been in his family life exactly what it had been in mine — a volatile, unstable element. My father was promiscuous? So was his mother, my Grandma. When I was 16 I opened my father’s briefcase and found that it was full of sexual implements? Well, when my father was 16, he opened the New York Daily News and found his mother identified as a notorious adulterer in a tabloid murder scandal. It made me wonder what he was like, before that. It made me try to understand what I was like, after that.
ALF: You never fully let go of your admiration for your father, even as you interrogate the impact of his choices. How did you navigate writing about someone you loved without protecting him and without turning the book into a reckoning that removes his complexities?
TJ: I went through many years living in fear of making my book exactly that — a reckoning that removed his complexities. I didn’t want that. I didn’t think anybody would want that, because my father was a bewitching man, and a book that missed that aspect of him was a book that missed the point. So finally I just allowed myself to be — to stay — bewitched, no matter how many of his infamies I exposed. I loved my father. I still love him. I would not have been able to tell the truth about him had I not told that truth about myself.
ALF: The book seeks to answer the question, what makes a man? After exploration of your father’s life and your own, do you believe that question even has a real answer, or is it something men inherit and struggle against forever?
TJ: The latter, I guess. I never try to turn this book into a statement of any kind, I never employ an essayistic voice, I never try to explain or analyze anything but the moment at hand. But of course it is haunted by the question of what makes a man, because my father was very much haunted by the question of what makes a man. And what he ultimately forces me to try understanding is the distinction between a man and a good man. My father was, in many ways, not a good man. He was, in many ways, a bad man. He might even have acknowledged that. But he would have also insisted that it didn’t matter if he was good or bad, because, good or bad, he was and always will be a man, above all else. And it’s that I have to struggle with — the idea that manhood itself is a transcendent category, beyond such fretful qualifiers as good and bad. My father tried to be a man. I try to be a good man. There’s the rub. And there’s the book.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Tom Junod is a 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.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER: Al-Lateef Farmer is a writer and educator from New Jersey. He is the co-founder of Fellowship of the Griots, a literary community rooted in deep, honest storytelling for writers of color. He is currently working on Avery Heights, a linked collection of stories set in a fictional New Jersey city, where place carries history and every life leaves a mark.