Book Cover: In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to be a Man: A Memoir by Tom Junod
Tom Junod Photo: Deanna SIrlin
In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to be a Man: A Memoir by Tom Junod
In conversation with Phil Auslander
Irving "Chip" Schocket and Lou Junod. Harwyn Club, 52nd Street, New York City. Mid- to late 1950s. Lou represented one of Chip's lines;
Chip gave Lou lessons in savoir faire as well as his wife Valerie.
Award-winning Atlanta-based journalist Tom Junod has just published his first book, In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to be a Man: A Memoir (Doubleday), a reflection on his relationship with his father that was nine years in the making. Junod is celebrated for clear-eyed, hard-hitting deeply reported articles, including unsparing profiles of celebrities, thought-provoking feature articles, and in-depth investigative pieces. He began his career at GQ, then moved to Esquire. He has also worked for Atlanta Magazine, Life, and Sports Illustrated. He has been a senior writer at ESPN.com since 2019.
In “The Falling Man” (Esquire, September 12, 2024) Junod says of Richard Drew, the photographer who took a controversial photograph of a man falling from the World Trade Center during the 9/11 attack, “he has never not taken a picture, never averted his eye. . . . He is a journalist.” Much the same can be said of Junod: he, too, does not avert his eye but grapples as a journalist with what is before him, whatever the outcome. In some cases, such as “Untold” (ESPN.com, April 13, 2022) the article Junod wrote with collaborator Paula Lavigne that unearthed the crimes of Penn State football player and rapist Todd Hodne, the results can be harrowing. By contrast, Junod’s well-known profile of Mr. Rogers, “Can You Say . . . ‘Hero’?” (Esquire, November 1998) that served as the basis for the film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019), is as much about the life-changing encounter between a cynical journalist fascinated by evil and a man committed to good as it is about Mr. Rogers.
In 2022, The Art Section published a conversation with Junod in which he discusses his approach to writing. Here, we focus on his acclaimed new book, In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to be a Man: A Memoir (Doubleday), described by Library Journal as “a hauntingly detailed account of generational masculine projection, skillfully told with a journalist’s rigor and a son’s insightfulness.” Junod turns his unflinching investigative eye on his own family, and by extension, himself. He begins with wanting to understand his charming, charismatic but also highly problematic father, Lou Junod, and to confirm suspicions he had formed as a child. Talking with his father’s friends and his own relatives—including some he didn’t know about—Junod uncovers layer upon layer of suppressed family history, leading to some startling revelations.
Phil Auslander
Atlanta, Georgia
April 2026
A photo of Tom's father standing on the beach in Miami with Frankie Klein, one of his father’s best friends and his Florida wingman. Both Lou and Frankie distributed the photo en masse to the handbag industry, his Dad because he was in his prime, and Frankie because he basked in the reflected light. 1965.
Tommy Junod’s (center) eyes are wide open at his First Communion breakfast with his mother, Fran; his sister Cathy and his brother Michael. Lou Junod’s eyes are wide open too. 1965
Phil Auslander: You and I are of the same generation, and I relate to the idea of having a father who is both known and unknowable, a sometimes-terrifying presence who subordinated the family to his own desires. Do you think that there was a distinctive postwar idea of masculinity that underpinned these men’s attitudes?
Tom Junod: I often wonder about this. A lot of people say, "Well, that was a different time." But my father was a different man, in a different time. I didn't know anybody like him. I knew many World War 2 veterans. But my father not only saw combat in World War 2; he toured Europe as a band singer. So, I think it's hard to categorize him, and I'm at pains not to categorize him in the book. At the same time, I think the men who fought and won the war get a bad rap when they are called The Greatest Generation. They came home to a new country and had the license to re-invent themselves. They were The Free-est Generation.
PA: Without issuing a spoiler, one theme of the book is your resistance to being like your father only to fall into his behavior. Do you think this is inevitable?
TJ: It is perhaps no surprise that I go to therapy. And one of the things my therapist and I talk about is the dangers of what he calls "The Father Vow." You, as a son, vow never to be like your father and therefore you ensure that you end up like your father. It's a mystery, and the dynamics of that mystery are what keep me coming back for more.
PA: In the book, you talk of a transition from fighting your father to fighting for your father. How did this change come about?
TJ: When I was growing up, my father made me cry. When I returned from college, he made me laugh. It was a fundamental transformation in my life. I always saw him as threatening; now, suddenly, he was ridiculous. And we were both in on the joke. I wasn't mocking him; it was simply that his expectations about life were so outsized they were impossible, and he was both a tragic and comic figure. That change in perception only sharpened as he and I grew older. He was not a man meant to grow old, and yet he held on to his essence of tragicomic grandeur.
PA: In relation to the idea of fighting for your father, what understanding of him do you hope your readers come away with?
TJ: My father was not necessarily a good man. He was in fact a destructive one. But I loved him then, and I love him now. Do I want the reader to love him as well? Not exactly. But I do want the reader to think about the complexities of love, and the mysteries of influence, especially parental. We don't get to choose who we love, and we don't get to choose who influences us. But we do get to choose what we love about them and what we don't. We do get to choose which influences we accept and which we don't.
PA: You speak often in the book about resemblances, of seeing your features in other people’s faces and hearing other people’s voices in your own. I’m intrigued by your use of ellipses and italics in the book, which suggest a way of channeling the cadences of other people’s voices, perhaps your father’s, in your writing. Have I got that right?
TJ: You do. When it came to choose a narrator for the audiobook, I chose myself, for the simple the reason that I didn't think any actor could reproduce my father's speech patterns as well as I could. And my father's speech was at the heart of his seductiveness and his self-invention. My dad was a Brooklyn tough. And yet, by the time I knew him, his sentences scanned like poetry. It was part of his hold on me, and it's the way he lives on in my work. I use a lot of ellipses and italics in all my writing. But I'm sure I set a record for them in my book.
PA: You characterize your work as a writer as research, as detective work, as snooping, and the book is at least partly about the compulsion to uncover and reveal the truth at almost any cost. Where do you think this compulsion comes from?
TJ: There were two things I knew as a child: one, that I was powerless, and two, that there was something different about my father, something unspoken and rather sinister. I had a hunch about him, and following up on it was the only real power I had.
PA: One result of this research, with your quest to know your father at its center, is that you come to see him through the eyes of many other people and in the context of a multi-generational family history. How did this impact or reshape your own perception of him?
TJ: When I was 16, I found out the combination of my father's briefcase and in so doing found conclusive evidence that my father had a secret life. When my father was 16, his beloved mother was involved in a scandalous murder that occupied the front pages of New York City tabloids for months. She was identified, for all to see, as an adulterer. He never spoke about it, and learning about it made me realize that he bore a private pain -- and that maybe we weren't so different.
Louis Junod and Frances Brandshagan Junod. July 7, 1947, Atlantic City.
Louis Junod and his son Tommy. Wantagh, New York. 1958.
This is the photo Lou mass produced and sent to all his buyers.
PA: Is there anything you uncovered in researching your family’s complex history that you now wish you didn’t know?
TJ: No.
PA: The process of writing this story entails a forensic examination of numerous documents, photographs, home movies, and so on. Photographs play a central role in the book, and one of your best-known articles, “The Falling Man,” is also about a photograph. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the presence and power of photographs—both journalistic and personal--in our lives.
TJ: Great question. I have a lot of photography books at home and spend a lot of time looking at them. I guess I like them because, to me, all photographs contain a mystery -- what's happening in them challenges what you can say is happening in them. They speak directly to the viewer with an unspoken truth that seems to hover just outside the frame. Home movies have the same effect, but the effect is compounded by history. They are not art; they are not even nostalgic, since what you see in most of them is the spectacle of people performing for the camera, trying to be what they are not. So, even when the movies are beautiful, even when they are populated by people you love, they are all forensic in nature. They are all evidence.
PA: Why did you choose to write this book at this point in your life?
TJ: It was time.
Tom Junod is a senior writer at ESPN and has wrote for Esquire and GQ. He has won two National Magazine Awards, a James Beard Award and the June Biedler Award for Cancer Writing. His work has been widely anthologized, and his 2003 9/11 story, "The Falling Man," was selected, on Esquire's 75th anniversary, as one of the seven best stories in the history of the magazine.
Tom Junod with Dexter
Photo: Janet Folk
Philip Auslander writes frequently on performance, music, and art. His most recent books are In Concert: Performing Musical Persona, published in 2021, the third edition of Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, and Women Rock! Portraits in Popular Music, both 2023. Dr. Auslander is a Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech, and the Editor of The Art Section.
Phil Auslander
Photo: Marie Thomas