Growing up in a suburban split-level in the ’60s and ’70s in Wantagh, Long Island, and at a summer home amid the dunes of Westhampton Beach steps from the Atlantic, Tom Junod ’80 feared the ocean. It was vast, unpredictable and powerful, an uncontrollable force that could pull you under without warning. For young Junod, the ocean was like his father.
Junod spent his writing life on an obsessive quest to peel back layers of familial deception to reckon with his secretive and abusive father, a hard-drinking, heavy-gambling and hypermasculine serial philanderer who at once terrified and enthralled his son. His dad coerced his adolescent son into serving as his betting accomplice on illegal football gambling and sometimes got so enraged after big losses that he punched holes in doors.
His dad brought him into his business as a traveling handbag salesman after Tom graduated from the University at Albany with a bachelor’s degree in English. Tom was on a sales trip in a Los Angeles hotel room, hallway door left ajar, “when I felt the click of a .45 automatic at my temple” and narrowly survived being shot to death in a holdup.
After that traumatizing episode, his dad’s response was to try getting his son laid, even though he knew Junod had a serious, long-term girlfriend, Janet, his future wife, whom he followed to UAlbany after she transferred from SUNY Oneonta, where they first met. “I almost died, and my dad could only think about hooking me up with one of his girlfriends,” said Junod, who pronounces his name joo-NO to break from his father’s way of saying it, juh-NOD.
As one of the country’s most celebrated magazine writers, whose byline and soaring prose graced the pages of GQ, Esquire and ESPN and won major writing prizes, Junod wrote lengthy celebrity profiles of Tony Curtis, Frank Sinatra, Norman Mailer, and about a certain strain of machismo that aligned with the outsize persona of his father, Louis (“Big Lou”) Junod.
Those magazine pieces, including an acclaimed profile of Mister Rogers that juxtaposed the profound empathy of the beloved children’s TV show host with Big Lou’s darkly destructive and self-absorbed paradigm of manhood, were a warmup to Junod’s first book, In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man: A Memoir, published in March by Doubleday.
The Wall Street Journal called it “one of the great literary tributes to a complex paterfamilias,” and The New York Times said “it moves like a song, drawing you in with its melody before delivering an emotional wallop.” (The title comes from the 1969 Led Zeppelin song “Good Times Bad Times.”)
Writing the memoir was a journey of self-discovery, a test of Junod’s writerly craft and a master class in investigative journalism. He tapped all his skills while diving into generations of family secrets and entrenched lies to reach bedrock truth. For Junod, coming to terms with his father was about augmenting years of therapy and facing his demons.
“It was never a question of not loving my father, because I did love him. But I was trying to understand him and whether I could forgive him, which I think is still up in the air,” Junod told me. “Writing this book did help me in trying to be a better and different kind of man than my dad.”
Junod was a pale, sickly, perpetually frightened child, a momma’s boy who immersed himself in comic books. He could never live up to his father’s manly virtues and melted into a sniveling, sobbing puddle when his dad confronted him about his “weakling” status. A near-fatal bout of bronchitis in infancy caused a priest to administer emergency unction and communion before antibiotics saved Junod, a decade younger than his brother and sister, twins. He was the baby that his parents’ friends referred to as “an accident.” Self-conscious about a “protruding rib” because he was skinny as a rail, Junod was a failure at sports, another disappointment to his father. He preferred solitary indoor pursuits to the beach, where he burned easily and was afraid of the breakers.
By contrast, his father jogged along the crowded beach “nearly naked” in a black bikini, stopping every couple hundred yards to pound out pushup reps. This was after Big Lou lathered up with baby oil and held a tanning reflector to achieve “a fresh burn” and a mahogany hue. He liked to worship his swarthy, matinee idol good looks and muscular physique in front of a mirror while lecturing his son: “Look at this body…Have you ever seen a body…like this?”
Junod looked past the egotism and tried to incorporate his father’s fashion and lifestyle tips: Clean your navel with witch hazel and a cotton swab…The turtleneck is the most flattering thing a man can wear…The better you look, the more money you make…Tell a smart woman she’s beautiful, and tell a beautiful woman she’s smart.
Louis Junod remained married to his long-suffering wife of 59 years, Frances, before dying of heart failure in 2006 at age 87. He was a decorated World War II combat veteran and Purple Heart recipient who bore deep wounds, both psychological and physical, including the frustration of failing to make it as a crooner like his hero Frank Sinatra after a brief run as a wartime nightclub singer.
The author excavated the long-buried roots of his family tree and discovered that his destitute grandmother literally prostituted her kids, mostly likely including Lou, who refused to talk about his past. He also would not discuss his unresolved anger toward his own father, a shadowy figure he tried to erase until he showed up as a down and-out beggar at their Wantagh home when Tom was a boy.
To access his trauma, Junod had to remove the mask he had worn for so long as a handsome, suave, sophisticated magazine writer forged by his father’s rules of manliness. Sink or swim, he would have to summon the courage to go out into the open water and dive deep into the undertow of his father’s dark secrets.
“People saw me as always having it together, but I didn’t,” Junod said. “A really emotional part of this experience came from conversations with close friends who read the book and said they didn’t know how broken I was inside.”
Junod toiled for years at a first draft of the memoir and amassed 230,00 words of a manuscript before he decided it wasn’t working. He recalled what a director friend told him about unedited scenes of a film-in-progress shared with noted filmmaker Steven Soderbergh, who observed: “You documented it, but you didn’t film it.”
For Junod, it was a revelation. “That explained why the 230,000 words ended up in the garbage heap. I documented it but didn’t film it. It was just my dad floating through life and doing whatever damage he did,” Junod explained. “I didn’t have the counterweight of me feeling incredibly weak and afraid of him but at the same time determined to counter him and stand up to him in some way.”
The wounded heart of the book is Junod’s mother, Frances “Fran” Junod, who died at 92 in 2008. She endured Big Lou’s titanic, egomaniacal overpowering presence, which sucked all the oxygen out of any room he inhabited and left her a cowering, hiccup-plagued survivor of psychological abuse. Ever since he was a little kid filming his dad with a Super 8 camera, snooping in his closet when he was away and eavesdropping on his conversations, Tom Junod spent a lifetime documenting his parents. It wasn’t until his mother died that Junod felt free to focus his energy and skills on uncovering the truth, wherever it led — to “filming” his life story and his father’s destructive role in it, to borrow Soderbergh’s analogy.
“I wrote this book at least in part to give my mom her proper due in my life,” Junod told me.
In the past decade, Junod examined the depths of his wounded soul by employing his writerly skills and a detective’s tactics, crisscrossing the country interviewing family members, interrogating his late father’s associates and using genetic testing to confirm the book’s biggest revelation.
He will never know what his late mother thought about his memoir, but any profound act of truth-telling will ultimately inflict some level of collateral damage on those in the family narrative who never consented to ugly family secrets being dredged up for the world to read.
“The book has been toughest on Michael,” Junod said of his older brother, who was hospitalized with a mental breakdown that could be partly attributed to the trauma his father inflicted. “Michael and I are really close, and we talk almost every day. We love each other, and he believes I had the right to write my story. I don’t think the secrets I revealed have set Michael free the way they did for me. I think he’s slowly coming around to accept it, though.”
Junod’s sister, Cathy, died in 2022 at 74 of complications from Alzheimer’s disease and she was unable to be interviewed by her brother. Near the end of the memoir, he describes a home movie he discovered captures his father kissing Cathy on the mouth, as if she were one of his mistresses. “I was shocked when I saw that movie, and it changed everything,” Junod said. “The skies darkened at that moment, for sure. All I could say for certain was how it made me feel to see it, and that’s where I left it, because that’s as far as I could go.”
His late sister’s husband, Ronnie, was dead set against the book and tried to stop Junod from publishing it. “We went to battle for a while. I knew it was going to cause pain, but he eventually came to support my right to tell the story,” Junod said. “He called me when he finished reading and thanked me for writing it, in tears.”
The memoir and its success also allowed Junod, 68, to turn down a three-year contract extension as a senior writer for ESPN. He will turn next to fiction.
“I’m foolish enough to want to write a novel, which I’ve wanted to do since I was at UAlbany and read Faulkner and took a fiction writing course with Eugene Mirabelli,” he recalled.
Traveling across the country to bookstores and other venues for dozens of book signings and author talks taught Junod grim truths about fatherhood.
“So many people came up to me after an event to share their stories, and there are a lot of philandering dads out there,” he said. “I heard weird, shocking stories all the time. It also brought some closure. I always thought I was the only one who had a father like this, and I’ve learned that is not the case. I had a lot of super-intense conversations, and I was moved that my book opened readers up like that.”
At the 92nd Street Y in New York City, a day after the book was published, an elderly man waited until everyone else had finished getting their books signed, and he told Junod, “I started writing a letter to my dad last night, and I started with these words: ‘You always pissed on my parade.’”
One other unexpected outcome of the memoir-writing experience was that the pain it caused also brought about a measure of healing. Junod had reached the other side of the breakers, where the ocean was calmer.
For the first time in his life, there was an extended family reunion with the family and relatives he did not know or who were estranged. They came together in July at Junod’s house on Shelter Island with his wife, Janet, and daughter, Nia, for a Junod reunion.
“That gathering would not have happened without the memoir,” he said. “I feel that I wrote a book in which pain is a feature, but it’s not the end result.”
Paul Grondahl is an award-winning journalist, biographer and Opalka Endowed Director of the New York State Writers Institute.