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

A Memoir

Author Tom Junod

Hardcover

$32.00 US

Doubleday Publishing | Doubleday

6.43"W x 9.42"H x 1.29"D | 22 oz | 12 per carton

On sale Mar 10, 2026 | 416 Pages | 9780375400391

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From two-time National Magazine Award winner Tom Junod, a searching, brilliantly stylized memoir about a charismatic, philandering father who tried to mold his son in his image, the many secrets he hid, the son’s obsessive quest to uncover them, and ultimately, the true meaning of manhood

Big Lou Junod dominated every room he entered. He worshipped the sun and the sea, his own bronzed body, Frank Sinatra, and beautiful women. He was a successful traveling handbag salesman who carried himself like a celebrity. He’d return from the road with stories of going to nightclubs where the stars—Ava Gardner, maybe Liz Taylor—“couldn’t keep their eyes off . . . your father.” He had countless affairs and didn’t do much to hide them.

Lou could be cruel to Fran, his wife of fifty-nine years, but he loved his youngest son. Tom was a skin-and-bones, nervous boy, devoted to his mother, but Lou sought to turn him into a version of himself. He showered him with advice about how to dress (“A turtleneck is the most flattering thing a man can wear”), how to be an alpha male, and especially, how to attract and bed women. His parting speech when Tom went to college was: “Do yourself a favor and date a Jewish girl. They’re all nymphos.” When Tom started seeing his future wife, Janet, Lou’s efforts to entice Tom into his version of manhood accelerated on nights in New York, L.A., and Paris.

Tom wrestled with Lou’s imposing presence all his life. When one of Lou’s mistresses stood up at his funeral and announced, “Can we all . . . just agree . . . that this . . . was a man,” Tom set off to learn the facts of his father’s life, and why he was the way he was. The stunning secrets he uncovered—about his father, his father’s lovers, and deceptions going back generations—staggered Tom, but in the process allowed him, at last, to become his own man, by his own lights.

In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man is an intensely emotional detective story powered by a series of cascading revelations. The book is a triumph of bravura writing; it is a tale of a son reckoning with the consequences of his father’s life, and in the end, the story of the son’s redemption.

“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

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. View titles by Tom Junod

And so as there is fire, there has to be water, and he owns them both. The sun rises and falls over the sea, and the sea is on the other side of the dune behind the house, and each morning in Westhampton begins with his call—“All right, gid up. It’s time to hit . . . the beach.” He’s kidding around, trying to sound like a drill instructor from the war, but he never says he’s kidding, and sometimes, if we don’t get up quickly enough, he sprays us with a hose. Michael and I share the bunkhouse in Westhampton, the way we share a room at home in Wantagh, and sometimes friends stay with us, along with our German shepherd, Nikki. But no matter who is with us, they have to “get with the program,” my father says. In order to eat breakfast, they have to get up, and “work up an appetite.” They have to run the beach.

So do I. I passed some kind of test, when I went into the deep water with Uncle Lenny, and dog-paddled to my retreating father’s beseeching arms. Now I’ve earned the right to continue to be tested, like my brother, although, unlike Michael, I’m not “well-built,” but scrawny, a charcoal sketch of a boy in a family of comic-book superheroes. But here I am, somehow, on the beach, following my father’s footsteps in the sand, trying to do push-ups when he does, every hundred yards. We do not run fast; he does not run fast, he “jogs,” turning around as he goes, snapping his hands open and closed, exhorting us, no matter how many of us—his boys, his underlings—there are. He is performing, as he is in everything he does, and now his performance includes me. “We’ll run to the public beach . . . and back,” he declares. How far is the public beach? I have no idea, it throbs in the distance as a mottled density of color (other people) in a world otherwise completely composed of blue (ocean, sky) and white (sand, light). But my father is always setting a goal, and so we jog there and back, and when we return to our own private beach our reward stretches infinitely before us: the ocean. We have not gone swimming yet; we have not been allowed to, we’ve had to “work up a sweat” before swimming as we’ve had to “work up an appetite” before eating. Am I sweating? Little boys don’t sweat. Michael always tells me about the speech our father gave him when he turned thirteen, the one about his glands—“Son, your glands . . . are changing.” I’m not sweating, and my glands only change when they swell up in my throat when I get sick, as I so often do. But when my father and my brother and all the men and boys who are with them dive into the sea, I follow. The sun has risen over the water in the east, and when I emerge from under the water to breathe, I see my father do the same, and the joy he experiences he shares, and somehow transmits to me for the rest of my life. “Nectar . . . of the gods!” he exclaims, and yes, there are swimmers in the Olympics, but this is different, this is our own Olympus beyond the waves. We are bathing in water, but also in light, in pure incandescence, the ocean so clean the sun shines through the waves, and my father grabs at it, in handfuls. First, he washes his face, but then he raises the whole sea to his lips, as if in a goblet, and says, “It’s so clean you can drink it!” And he does! He scoops a handful of water into his mouth and then spits it out in a stream, as if he were the stone figure in a fountain! He doesn’t swallow—no, he’s always told me not to swallow salt water, even as he tells me that salt water can cure all my “ailments.” But Uncle Lenny, when he is with my father, will sometimes raise his fists to the sky and ask, like a petitioner, “What does he want? WHAT . . . DOES . . . THIS . . . MAN . . . WANT?” And now I know. My favorite book in school is the book about the five Chinese brothers, including the brother who swallows the sea in one gulp and leaves the fish flapping in the sand. My father is like that. He is the man who wants to drink the ocean.

One day, he doesn’t tell me to put on my trunks, and we don’t go to the beach. Instead, he comes into the bunkhouse whisking his palms together, and asks, “Hey, buddy-boy, how would you like . . . a hot fudge sundae?” He’s a salesman like Pavlov is a salesman, and in an instant I’m salivating. How would I like a hot fudge sundae? What kind of question is that? I love hot fudge sundaes! “Do you know who makes the best hot fudge sundae . . . in the world?” I don’t! Who? “A place called Act IV, in Southampton. How about you and me go to Act IV . . . for a hot fudge sundae?” Really, Dad? Sure! “Well, then . . . get dressed.”

Of course, he is dressed already, the way he dresses when he goes out in Westhampton, especially when he goes, around sunset, “in the shank of the evening,” to a hotel down the road called the Dune Deck, where he drinks at the bar and listens to Teddy Wilson from the Benny Goodman orchestra play the piano and sometimes sings “a couple of numbers.” It’s a uniform, of sorts— an orange sweater with a plunging neckline worn directly against his skin, and a pair of white jeans he calls, after the drumroll caesura, “white ducks.” I wear a sweater, too, but with buttons, and then the dressy shorts my mother buys me, and then a pair of bright-white PF Flyers, and off we go, my father and I, “a couple of dudes,” as he says, off to consort with “the swells” at Act IV. But we don’t go to Act IV, at least not directly. We don’t go to Southampton, either. He stops the red T-bird at a house in Shinnecock Hills, small and far away from the ocean, with bristly suburban grass struggling to grow from the sandy soil. We’re visiting one of his buyers, he says, but when she meets us at the door she’s a lady, svelte and stylish, with arms bared by her crewneck top and ankles exposed by her clamdigger pants. She has coppery hair she wears up, off her shoulders, and she walks with a contained contraband strut that makes it seem she’s walking on a wire. But what’s most striking about her is that she’s all alone, with no husband, no kids, no company except a dachshund the same color as her hair. “Oh, he likes you,” she tells me as she pours my father a drink, not one of his summer drinks but rather a winter one, brown liquor over ice he stirs with his index finger, his tic, his tell, making music as if he’s ringing a bell. Then she opens the sliding doors to the backyard, and I follow the dog to the swing set planted on a little scrub-grassed hill. Nobody has to tell me to play; I just do, me and the dog partners in wonderland. But after a while there’s a problem: I don’t know how to swing on my own. I’m one of those kids who needs a push. I try to get started by moving my feet like Fred Flintstone, but then I stall out and just sit there, missing the comic book I left on the bar where the buyer who lives all alone poured my father a drink. I decide to go find it, but when I try to go back inside the house, I can’t. The sliding doors are locked, and when I look inside for my father and the buyer there’s nobody home. I go back out to the swings, and stare at the ground while using my feet to give me the illusion of movement and altitude, until my father and the buyer finally walk outside, her face a little brightened, as if, in her absence, she went out to get some color.

“All right,” my father says, with his palms going. “Are you ready? Are you ready for . . . a hot fudge sundae?” He turns to the buyer and says, “Can you believe it? The poor kid’s never been to Act IV?”

“Never been to Act IV?” she says, stooping in front of me with her hands folded and her knees pressed together. “Oh, Tommy—you’re gonna love it!”

“Can I go inside and get my comic book?” I ask, and for some reason this question causes her to look at my father instead of me.

“Of course you can go back inside and get your comic book,” she says, and when she releases me by mussing my hair I run as fast as I can and pluck the comic book off the bar as if someone might steal it.

At Act IV, my father’s meeting a bunch of his friends from New York City—his “cronies,” my mother calls them—and they all greet him like a conquering hero. I can’t tell them about the buyer because they’re all salesmen and I’m not supposed to talk business with my father’s competitors. “Why so quiet?” one of them asks, but once I open the menu I don’t really care that I don’t have an answer. I don’t even have to open my comic book. Everything on the menu at Act IV is named after a Broadway show and as I look around I see that the restaurant itself is decorated just like my father’s basement bar in Wantagh, with black-and-white photographs of celebrities all over the walls. I have to study the menu to see which of the sundaes with funny names is plain hot fudge and spend the rest of the time staring at the singers and movie stars and wondering why my father is not with them, why I can’t find a photograph of him up on the wall, way up there and lost among the stars.