I had always read James Baldwin’s declaration “I want to be an honest man and a good writer” as a statement of artistic ambition—the kind of thing a young person, defining themselves for the world, says in order to be taken seriously. It comes at the end of “Autobiographical Notes,” the introduction to his first essay collection Notes of a Native Son, where he declares that he has no hobbies, no interest in anything else that is not his work. Total dedication, at the expense of everything else that makes a life.
Perhaps I’ve grown more jaded over the years, but I read it differently now. I see it as a confession, an acknowledgment of his, our, limitations: One can aspire to be a good writer because there is no such thing as a good man. A cynical outlook, but it’s difficult to turn away from the evidence of the past decade: Donald Trump, Brett Kavanaugh, Pete Hegseth, Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Charlie Rose, R. Kelly, 4chan, the “manosphere,” the eager correspondents of the Epstein files, on and on and on. Call it toxic masculinity, male supremacy, patriarchy, misogyny, whatever you like, at the end of it is a picture of manhood that appears incompatible with the idea of “goodness.” Even the men who have appeared good, who haven’t done what Trump or Cosby or Weinstein have done to earn our disdain, have failed at goodness in other ways—they, we, have failed at being honest.
Tom Junod is a good writer. Great, even. He is the only writer to win back-to-back National Magazine Awards for feature writing (one a profile of an abortion doctor, the other a profile of a rapist, both written for GQ). He won a James Beard Award for his essay “My Mom Couldn’t Cook,” published in Esquire, where Junod wrote for more than a decade; his story “The Falling Man” makes the rounds every anniversary of 9/11, taken out from behind the Esquire paywall, a classic of magazine writing. A recent profile of Junod, in that very magazine, says: “A list of Esquire’s ten most important writers in the magazine’s nearly 100-year history would probably look like this: [Norman] Mailer, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, James Baldwin, Nora Ephron, Richard Ben Cramer, and, well, Tom Junod.”
For a long time, what had separated Junod from the rest of that list was that he had written no book. He has changed that now with a memoir, In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man. It’s a book, he says, he has been researching for the past 10 years, but it’s probably best to understand its origin in the essay “My Father’s Fashion Tips,” which Junod wrote for GQ in 1996. The essay finds Junod talking to his father, Lou Junod, about—no surprise—his fashion advice, though of course it’s really about his advice on how to be a man. “In my father’s view a man is not allowed irony in the wearing of clothes. Irony is for women, because for them clothes are all about play, all about tease and preamble—because for them dressing is all about undressing,” Junod wrote. “For a man, though, clothes both determine and mark his place in the world; they are about coming from nakedness, rather than going to it—and so irony spells diminution, because irony says that you don’t mean it … and you have to mean it. You have to mean what you wear.”
It’s a profile written by a son in awe of his father—in love with the man and all he represents. It’s not honest. Not about who Lou Junod was, not about how Tom Junod truly felt about him. In In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man, Tom recalls what his mother, Frances, said to him after that essay was published: “Don’t forget who raised you, kid.”
This memoir is Junod’s mea culpa, a 30-year-late revision toward honesty. “There were always secrets,” he wrote in 1996. “You could not walk into my father’s bathroom and not know there were secrets. Secrets of grooming, secrets of hygiene, secrets of preparation, secrets of the body itself—secrets and knowledge.” But his father’s secrets were not secret to Tom; he learned them early, his father barely kept them from him. Lou didn’t conceal his infidelities—he took young Tom along to some of them. He bragged about the starlets who admired him on his trips to Manhattan (Zsa Zsa Gabor, Ava Gardner). He hid his dildos and hardcore fetish pornography only to the extent that Tom had to open his father’s briefcase and find them. It was Tom who kept the secrets. Kept them from his mother, his two siblings, from the world. It was Tom who wrote his father’s legend, the mythology of himself as a self-made man and paragon of masculine and patriarchal virtue. He wrote it because he loved his father, loved him too much to be honest about the man he actually was.
“But I loved you,” Junod writes in a letter to his father at the end of In the Days of My Youth, “in order to survive you.”
Lou Junod, a World War II veteran from Brooklyn who made his living as a traveling handbag salesman, was not violent toward his family. That was a point of pride for him. Violence was not the way he imposed his will and instilled fear. He simply sucked up all the air in the room. He carried himself like a celebrity, and in his mind he was one. Lou and Tom, during a night on the town, have a chance run-in with Muhammad Ali in a hotel elevator, and all Lou has to say to the greatest boxer of all time is “Good night, champ,” as he and his son exit. He tells Tom he should never ask a celebrity for an autograph; they should be asking him.
There was little to interrupt Lou’s conception of himself. He bought two homes on Long Island, sent all three of his children to college, kept his wife in fine jewelry and furs, and attracted the attention of nearly every woman he walked by (“You’re just going to have to accept that your father was a Casanova, Tommy,” a woman with whom Lou carried on an 11-year affair tells Tom years after his father has passed). His wife may have considered him a pill, and his sister may have had a fresh insult for him every time the family gathered, but Lou Junod, in his cuff links and suntan and black bikini underwear, could not be brought down to size. He had a Purple Heart and a fat money clip. He had a wife and any other woman he so desired. He was a man.
It was a manhood built on half-truths, which Tom would later print in GQ. Lou was, in fact, a veteran and had been injured in Normandy, but after that he spent most of his war service in liberated Paris, singing in a revue with a name tailor-made for the subject of this book: For Men Only. The first home he purchased for himself and his family was at the dawn of Levittown, where “For $100 down, veterans—white veterans—could buy one of Bill Levitt’s houses and move in before the lawn was even seeded,” Junod writes. The version of manhood Lou was able to step into had been constructed specifically for men like him and was gatekept in such a way to allow those men to tell grand stories of themselves and their heroism, while the rest gawk with a mix of admiration and envy, wondering what the cost might be to gain entry into this exclusive club.
It’s something Tom intuits at a very young age, that there is a threshold he must cross in order to be seen as a man in his father’s eyes. During a family trip to Jones Beach, Tom, afraid of the water just as his mother was, finally wades out into the ocean, and Lou, surprised at his presence, admonishes him to swim to his father. “And I do,” Junod writes, “in a furious, hopeful, gasping dog paddle, suspended between escape and capture, swimming toward him even as he moves away, somehow understanding that manhood is a matter of admission, and that in order to gain admission I have to brave the deep water.”
He tried. He became a childhood bully to a boy weaker than him; he picked the teams his father would gamble on; he played high school football, even when it meant riding the bench as the fourth-string quarterback. Tom tried to convince his father, and himself, that he could be a man, as accomplished and resplendent as Lou Junod, but it was never quite enough. Not because of some inadequacy on Tom’s part, but because manhood itself is bankrupt, a performance with little to offer the audience or performer except a superficial interaction with the rest of the world—it believes the most flattering thing a man can wear is a turtleneck because it draws attention to the face, because the face is all it has. It’s soulless.
On the eve of Tom leaving for college, Lou entered his son’s room, ready to dispense some fatherly advice. Tom, like all of us, sat ready for there to finally be something, some meaning, previously inscrutable, finally revealed that would make his father, men, make sense. “My heart thumps involuntarily,” he writes, “like the tail of a dog whose master keeps speaking his name. After all these years and all those tears, here it is—the moment that will make it all worthwhile. He glances at the door to make sure my mother isn’t standing in it. He lowers his voice and speaks to me man to man.”
The advice? “Do yourself a favor and date a Jewish girl. They’re all … nymphos.”
That’s all there is, all there has ever been. Manhood is a club where the cost of admission is the degradation of others. Junod could have ended the book there and had an elegantly written, damning portrait of Lou Junod and the men like him, and subsequently the men who admire men like Lou, who claim we are living in a crisis of masculinity and want a return to the days of men being men because they are also too afraid to look beyond the shine of their cuff links. But in researching and telling the story of his father’s secrets, Junod found a web of even bigger secrets spread across his family history: siblings his father either didn’t know about or refused to acknowledge; the truth of his father’s paternity; a child his father may or may not have known about born to woman he had an affair with in Florida (whom Lou described as “the One”); and much, much more about his grandmother, his aunts, and all the rest. It turns In the Days of My Youth into an epic, sometimes difficult to follow—like a modern 10-hour docuseries that probably only needed three, stuffed full of details that can be fascinating but at times superfluous and distracting. Even the minor characters here get the full Tom Junod treatment, their own human-interest profile, but they’re only relevant when serving this larger question: Who might Lou Junod have been if he’d brought himself to wrangle with the truth?
Though this is a memoir of Lou Junod, the book is for Frances Junod. This is Tom’s apology to his mother, which began when he published “My Mom Couldn’t Cook” in Esquire back in 2010. By finally telling the truth about his father, he gives his mother the tenderness she was not afforded in life. Frances Junod suffered the effects of Lou’s “talent of making betrayal look classy, instead of cheap,” was there through it all, dimming her light to make room for Lou’s, which Tom only realized when she helped him through understanding an E.E. Cummings poem for his high school homework. “We’re happier alone than we are with him, happy together with Mom free to be herself,” he writes. “I know she is smart.… But when she tries to sound smart when Dad’s around she sounds strained and snobbish, all her intelligence draining into her worried hands, her watchful eyes. She is smartest when she feels what she’s thinking, and that’s what she doesn’t allow herself to do in front of him.” The real tragedy of manhood is what it does to everyone else in its orbit. We may wonder who Lou Junod might have been if he had confronted the truth, but the more pertinent question is who Frances Junod might have been if she had had a husband with the courage to love her.
Tom Junod has always been a good writer—great, even. With In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man, he has written an honest book. And it arrives honestly at a time when manhood needs no redemption: no redefinition, no rescuing, no return. “I have to figure out a way to be a man,” Junod writes, “by becoming a human being.”
