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In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man: A Memoir
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 “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.
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 “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.
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Published March 10, 2026
About the author
Tom Junod
7 books42 followersAmerican journalist. He is the recipient of two National Magazine Awards from the American Society of Magazine Editors.
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April 7, 2026Another one of those father-son chronicles where the father's bigger than life, thus giving the son an idea for a book. In his case, it's a Casanova dad who's unhappily married to the son's mother. Still, he's a good dad, teaching his son "what it means to be a man."
A lot of that has to do with hygiene, dressing, exercising, getting a lot of sun, not being afraid of the ocean, and drinking. Oh. And charming the ladies, as Sonny Boy Tom keeps finding out. In fact, as he becomes a teen, Tommy digs even more while his handbag salesman dad is away. Bad idea. His bigger than life dad begins to shrink in the kid's estimation.
The book runs long because the son can't stand a mystery. OK, a whole LOT of mysteries. He digs and investigates. He is a journalist, after all. In this sense, the first half of the book is carried by dad's "What's he going to do or say NEXT?" personality, and the second half of the book is carried by Tom's wrenching open of this skeleton in that closet, and that skeleton in this closet.
Sadly, not all question marks are answered, but many are, thanks to genetic testing, meeting little-known (and unknown!) relatives, and some squirmily uncomfortable interviews.
In truth, not every quest for answers intrigued equally, so after Dad dies, there's some fluctuation in interest. That said, it held my attention longer than I expected AND I finished a 400 page book during a busy stretch of 12 days. Hey. I'll take it. And be thankful my dad isn't as interesting as Tom's, who taught him how to properly clean his belly button, for instance.
The things we miss, when trying to become a man without proper instruction....
A lot of that has to do with hygiene, dressing, exercising, getting a lot of sun, not being afraid of the ocean, and drinking. Oh. And charming the ladies, as Sonny Boy Tom keeps finding out. In fact, as he becomes a teen, Tommy digs even more while his handbag salesman dad is away. Bad idea. His bigger than life dad begins to shrink in the kid's estimation.
The book runs long because the son can't stand a mystery. OK, a whole LOT of mysteries. He digs and investigates. He is a journalist, after all. In this sense, the first half of the book is carried by dad's "What's he going to do or say NEXT?" personality, and the second half of the book is carried by Tom's wrenching open of this skeleton in that closet, and that skeleton in this closet.
Sadly, not all question marks are answered, but many are, thanks to genetic testing, meeting little-known (and unknown!) relatives, and some squirmily uncomfortable interviews.
In truth, not every quest for answers intrigued equally, so after Dad dies, there's some fluctuation in interest. That said, it held my attention longer than I expected AND I finished a 400 page book during a busy stretch of 12 days. Hey. I'll take it. And be thankful my dad isn't as interesting as Tom's, who taught him how to properly clean his belly button, for instance.
The things we miss, when trying to become a man without proper instruction....
June 11, 2026
I am dead center between a 3 and a 4 star for this one. The book is split into three sections. The first section was an introduction to Junod's family, and most especially to his cruel, destructive, and selfish, and also loving, generous, and entertainingly larger-than-life father, Lou. There was enough tragic and entertaining material here to fill a book by itself. Junod brings some trenchant observations about the truly demented way many people define masculinity. He also addresses how damaging these definitions are and the impact on women and children. All that said, this went on way too long. Examples of Lou's depravity, wandering eye, wandering dick, and casual denial of the basic humanity of all who did not subscribe to his extremely narrow definition of proper behavior were so numerous that I felt desensitized. Yeah yeah, I know he banged many women, and hurt them. I know he broke up families, got off on the humiliation of women. I know he dismissed "sissies" as a waste of space. I know he degraded and diminished his wife. Enough. We learn later he did far worse things, and I think Junod was teeing that up for us, but for me, it did not work. After being immediately drawn in, there came a point where I seriously considered dnf'ing. I am glad I did not, though. This turned into a procedural of sorts, a mystery, and it was often gripping.
I saw a couple of reviews talking about how Junod betrayed his family with what he wrote. I mostly disagree with that. I think nearly everyone here was presented to the reader with empathy and without resort to black and white good and evil shortcuts. Many years ago, I regularly read and very much enjoyed Junod's work in GQ and Esquire. I stopped and refused to read anything further when he outed Kevin Spacey. We learned later that Spacey was a predator, but this is a separate issue. Had Junod uncovered evidence of the abuse of children and others without power, that would be a story that needed telling, and the incidental revelation that he was Gay would have been justifiable collateral damage. But without that story, Spacey's sexual orientation was his to reveal, and Junod took that for him, I guess for shits and giggles and the thrill of ruining a career (which in 1997 identifying someone as Gay could do). I still find the choice unforgivable, and am glad it backfired on Junod, and set his career back. I decided to read this despite that event, figuring that 25+ years was probably enough punishment (though I think he should apologize for that disgusting lapse of judgement and decency if he has not done so). I mention this because when I saw the reviews mentioned, I assumed he was careless with his family's privacy in the way he was with Spacey's, and I don't think he was for the most part. As Bill W tells us, we are only as sick as our secrets, and exposing those secrets (and there are some vile ones here, as vile as the later disclosures about Spacey) to light and air might hurt some people, but ultimately it is healing. And the perpetrators of the wrongs here are dead and also not deserving of protection. Those harmed have nothing to be ashamed of. There are a few people who stated clearly they did not want to be part of this story, and I wish he had left them out, but at least he kept their part in the story to an absolute minimum.
I recommend this, though not as a must-read. It is a fascinating story that addresses some larger societal issues that need addressing, and it does that well. A 3.5 that I am rounding up because part 3 was so strong.
I listened to this read by the author, and I thought the narration was excellent. Junod gives his father a voice that really brings home what an asshat he was.
I saw a couple of reviews talking about how Junod betrayed his family with what he wrote. I mostly disagree with that. I think nearly everyone here was presented to the reader with empathy and without resort to black and white good and evil shortcuts. Many years ago, I regularly read and very much enjoyed Junod's work in GQ and Esquire. I stopped and refused to read anything further when he outed Kevin Spacey. We learned later that Spacey was a predator, but this is a separate issue. Had Junod uncovered evidence of the abuse of children and others without power, that would be a story that needed telling, and the incidental revelation that he was Gay would have been justifiable collateral damage. But without that story, Spacey's sexual orientation was his to reveal, and Junod took that for him, I guess for shits and giggles and the thrill of ruining a career (which in 1997 identifying someone as Gay could do). I still find the choice unforgivable, and am glad it backfired on Junod, and set his career back. I decided to read this despite that event, figuring that 25+ years was probably enough punishment (though I think he should apologize for that disgusting lapse of judgement and decency if he has not done so). I mention this because when I saw the reviews mentioned, I assumed he was careless with his family's privacy in the way he was with Spacey's, and I don't think he was for the most part. As Bill W tells us, we are only as sick as our secrets, and exposing those secrets (and there are some vile ones here, as vile as the later disclosures about Spacey) to light and air might hurt some people, but ultimately it is healing. And the perpetrators of the wrongs here are dead and also not deserving of protection. Those harmed have nothing to be ashamed of. There are a few people who stated clearly they did not want to be part of this story, and I wish he had left them out, but at least he kept their part in the story to an absolute minimum.
I recommend this, though not as a must-read. It is a fascinating story that addresses some larger societal issues that need addressing, and it does that well. A 3.5 that I am rounding up because part 3 was so strong.
I listened to this read by the author, and I thought the narration was excellent. Junod gives his father a voice that really brings home what an asshat he was.
October 14, 2025
I didn't know what I was getting into when I first read about this upcoming title, but I devoured it in the course of a few days. Absolutely incredible tour de force writing of the story of a man, his father, and their families.
Knowing a bit about Tom Junod's authorial pedigree, reading about his father, here for the first time *everything* about him, has been enlightening. Especially after earlier depictions of their relationship on the page and screen weren't even close to his entire story.
This sprawling dual memoir (I hesitate to say dual, since it really covers so many lives) contains some nearly unbelievable moments and drops names here and there, but in the end I never doubted the veracity or at least the presumed veracity of any of the events and people encountered within.
It's truly a remarkable read: a family saga that hooked me instantly, and as it spiralled further away and then coiled back to its roots, I never wondered why I was learning about secondary or tertiary players; they all came together to create a whole, beautiful, messy picture.
Thanks to Doubleday for the DRC via Edelweiss.
Knowing a bit about Tom Junod's authorial pedigree, reading about his father, here for the first time *everything* about him, has been enlightening. Especially after earlier depictions of their relationship on the page and screen weren't even close to his entire story.
This sprawling dual memoir (I hesitate to say dual, since it really covers so many lives) contains some nearly unbelievable moments and drops names here and there, but in the end I never doubted the veracity or at least the presumed veracity of any of the events and people encountered within.
It's truly a remarkable read: a family saga that hooked me instantly, and as it spiralled further away and then coiled back to its roots, I never wondered why I was learning about secondary or tertiary players; they all came together to create a whole, beautiful, messy picture.
Thanks to Doubleday for the DRC via Edelweiss.
March 11, 2026
What starts out as a memoir of his father that every man envied, and every woman wanted quickly becomes an investigation into what Tom’s father really got up to gallivanting around the world selling handbags. From the son that feared his father as his polar opposite and his mother’s protector…comes the unraveling of shocking secrets abound.
March 27, 2026
This felt somehow too long and detailed and not detailed and long enough.
There were a lot of dates but at the same time, I had a hard time figuring out how old and where the author was when some of the events were going on. I didn’t get a good feel for his life either. He went from being in what seemed like remedial school to being a writer at a major magazine? How?? Why did he choose that profession? I have some ideas but I would have liked to have read his.
I think it should have been just a book about his dad or a book about himself. He tried to do both and I don’t think it worked that well.
There were a lot of dates but at the same time, I had a hard time figuring out how old and where the author was when some of the events were going on. I didn’t get a good feel for his life either. He went from being in what seemed like remedial school to being a writer at a major magazine? How?? Why did he choose that profession? I have some ideas but I would have liked to have read his.
I think it should have been just a book about his dad or a book about himself. He tried to do both and I don’t think it worked that well.
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April 4, 2026I found this engrossing until about three-quarters of the way through but grew bored and I wasn’t even to the big reveals. He is a good writer and has a great eye for detail. His descriptions of family members make each one distinct and singular. However, I found the father, mother, grandmother and father's friends to be despicable or close to that. They were desperate and sad and their personalities were not that interesting. They were drawn to sex and money yet their world was small potatoes and sort of pathetic. They all seemed trapped by habit or circumstance. I felt like they didn't deserve him using his estimable talents to memorialize them. He obviously loved them all and felt conflicted by his discoveries. I think the storytelling suffered from too little historical analysis of the time and place and how it created people like this, trying to be glamorous while living in suburbia; why there were generations enacting adultery, cruelty and bad behavior from Coney Island to Long Island.
April 21, 2026
I cannot put this particular book in my school library, but I highly recommend it. I felt just about every emotion while reading this book. At times, I felt very sympathetic for the author, particularly during his childhood. At other times, I felt almost angry at his selfishness and that of his father. I laughed and cried. It consumed me, and I craved more. Like the personality of the author's father, the memoir was also BIG. I enjoyed the nostalgia of a time similar to my childhood. The descriptive writing was superb. I started reading the electronic version and switched to the audiobook, and I'm very glad I did. The author had a fabulous voice, particularly when he spoke about Lou and enunciated all the last syllables. I will never forget this book.
April 5, 2026
I fear he doesn’t understand the function of ellipses…
March 14, 2026
Tom Junod's captivating, just-released book, In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What it Means to Be A Man, is a memoir wrapped around a mystery. Who was Tom Junod's father, Lou, really? To a young Tom, Lou was a gregarious and handsome enigma, a handbag salesman with style and swagger who inspired both awe and fear in the family home. Deeply tanned and always dressed to impress, Lou Junod espoused a certain mid-century brand of East Coast masculine bravado. He loved beautiful women and had many affairs, that was clear to Tom from a young age. But when Lou dies, Tom discovers a more complex web of emotional entanglements and family secrets that extend beyond his father's numerous dalliances. With the focus and intensity of an intrepid detective and the writing chops to carry the story, Tom Junod sets out to uncover what has been hidden, sometimes in plain sight: the truth. It's riveting.
The audiobook of this memoir is narrated by Tom Junod himself and gives the reader a stellar understanding of the cadence and tone of Lou Junod. For audiobook listeners, this one is... "gold" (written in the voice of Lou Junod).
The audiobook of this memoir is narrated by Tom Junod himself and gives the reader a stellar understanding of the cadence and tone of Lou Junod. For audiobook listeners, this one is... "gold" (written in the voice of Lou Junod).
April 18, 2026
Repetitive family bashing.
I kept thinking that I HAD to wade thru this entire redundant book. It was so well reviewed in NYT Book Review, LA Times Review etc etc. I trust them!!
I fear that the author suffers the same inflated self importance that his narcissistic father wielded on his own victims.
When Junod begins to go thru the entire sad, blame- game story AGAIN in the Epilogue, I could not read another word. I hope the author has a therapist who can write Rx for antidepressants. I hope he still has family that will speak to him after throwing so many of them under the wheels of his bus.
Ugh.
I kept thinking that I HAD to wade thru this entire redundant book. It was so well reviewed in NYT Book Review, LA Times Review etc etc. I trust them!!
I fear that the author suffers the same inflated self importance that his narcissistic father wielded on his own victims.
When Junod begins to go thru the entire sad, blame- game story AGAIN in the Epilogue, I could not read another word. I hope the author has a therapist who can write Rx for antidepressants. I hope he still has family that will speak to him after throwing so many of them under the wheels of his bus.
Ugh.
June 26, 2026
While I was reading this book, I told friends that it was the most engrossing memoir about a non-famous person I had ever read. Now that I have finished it, I want to say it is the most engrossing memoir I have ever read, period.
On one hand, it is a beautiful, searing, painfully even-handed portrait of a complicated man and his secrets. On the other, it is a love letter from a broken hearted son to his father and to all the people he influenced for good or bad.
It is worth every page and every minute I dedicated to reading it. I could not put it down. No notes.
On one hand, it is a beautiful, searing, painfully even-handed portrait of a complicated man and his secrets. On the other, it is a love letter from a broken hearted son to his father and to all the people he influenced for good or bad.
It is worth every page and every minute I dedicated to reading it. I could not put it down. No notes.
July 13, 2026
(3.5/5)
Led Zeppelin isn't mentioned once.
Led Zeppelin isn't mentioned once.
April 23, 2026
Finally I can stop noticing this book on my nightstand and singing the Led Zeppelin song in my head for the rest of the day! Dang, what a great title. Credit to his publisher, as we learn in the Acknowledgments. But enough about me.
This book is too long and SO much repetition to boot, some real easy editing right there. And the deep dive into the family tree should have been greatly truncated (see what I did there?) Big Lou definitely got a big book. But as larger than life as he was, it’s deeply troubling to learn about the overly sexual behaviors, especially the incest, running through his life. Was this inherited? Is that the takeaway when his mom fathered 7 kids with 5 fathers? (Hint: The Epilogue is a good crib note)
I don’t think adultery is a necessary component of living life to the fullest, which we’re supposed to learn about from Lou. And I rarely see men in turtlenecks but, um, ok? Amazing that he didn’t get skin or lung cancer. All in all a memorable guy and snapshot (long exposure?) of a family, time and place. It’s not easy to write about your family so kudos for that. Can’t think of a more opposite guy to Lou than Mr Rogers? That might have been a fun juxtaposition!
This book is too long and SO much repetition to boot, some real easy editing right there. And the deep dive into the family tree should have been greatly truncated (see what I did there?) Big Lou definitely got a big book. But as larger than life as he was, it’s deeply troubling to learn about the overly sexual behaviors, especially the incest, running through his life. Was this inherited? Is that the takeaway when his mom fathered 7 kids with 5 fathers? (Hint: The Epilogue is a good crib note)
I don’t think adultery is a necessary component of living life to the fullest, which we’re supposed to learn about from Lou. And I rarely see men in turtlenecks but, um, ok? Amazing that he didn’t get skin or lung cancer. All in all a memorable guy and snapshot (long exposure?) of a family, time and place. It’s not easy to write about your family so kudos for that. Can’t think of a more opposite guy to Lou than Mr Rogers? That might have been a fun juxtaposition!
May 18, 2026
Do yourself a favor and read the epilogue first. Then you can decide whether you want to wade through this book about a man who should have spent his years living as an honest human and not some warped idea of what a man's man really was, using caricatures of his "heroes" as templates for life.
Think instead of one good husband and father that you admire and hold him up, side by side, character trait by character trait, to this husband and father. Then think whether he deserves any of the praise he gets, or for that matter, even a single thought. Or better yet, put yourself in his (acknowledged) daughter's shoes, and see if he deserves the author's accolades about what a good parent he was.
Think instead of one good husband and father that you admire and hold him up, side by side, character trait by character trait, to this husband and father. Then think whether he deserves any of the praise he gets, or for that matter, even a single thought. Or better yet, put yourself in his (acknowledged) daughter's shoes, and see if he deserves the author's accolades about what a good parent he was.
May 2, 2026
What a shame that the author didn’t have a good editor! The book started so well, and I was completely hooked; however, it went downhill after about halfway through.
This book feels like a voluminous eulogy to his father, with whom he had a confusing relationship. The author paints a vivid portrait of his father: charismatic, impossible to trust, yet “magnetic and impossible not to be drawn to. There is a constant tension between admiration, suspicion, resentment, and grief that feels very honest and compelling. I especially liked the parts where he reflects on childhood and how confusing it is to grow up loving someone larger than life while also slowly realizing how much damage they caused.
Halfway through the book, the author becomes heavily focused on tracking down extended family members, possible half-siblings, and unraveling every branch of the family tree. I found myself losing track of who was who, and honestly, I just became utterly bored. I persisted, thinking that there would be some incredible reckoning at the end, but even that felt lackluster.
That said, I still think the book succeeds as a portrait of complicated family relationships and the way parents shape us long after childhood ends. I wish it had been tighter, shorter, and less meandering. Maybe the author lost himself in his catharsis, which in the end is what this felt like. I’m not sure he needed to spend 416 pages recounting it all, however.
This book feels like a voluminous eulogy to his father, with whom he had a confusing relationship. The author paints a vivid portrait of his father: charismatic, impossible to trust, yet “magnetic and impossible not to be drawn to. There is a constant tension between admiration, suspicion, resentment, and grief that feels very honest and compelling. I especially liked the parts where he reflects on childhood and how confusing it is to grow up loving someone larger than life while also slowly realizing how much damage they caused.
Halfway through the book, the author becomes heavily focused on tracking down extended family members, possible half-siblings, and unraveling every branch of the family tree. I found myself losing track of who was who, and honestly, I just became utterly bored. I persisted, thinking that there would be some incredible reckoning at the end, but even that felt lackluster.
That said, I still think the book succeeds as a portrait of complicated family relationships and the way parents shape us long after childhood ends. I wish it had been tighter, shorter, and less meandering. Maybe the author lost himself in his catharsis, which in the end is what this felt like. I’m not sure he needed to spend 416 pages recounting it all, however.
April 13, 2026
Some of the best memoir writing I’ve read in a minute.
July 4, 2026
This book certainly explained a lot about why the Baby Boomer generation is so fucked up.
But anyway, this book always kept me turning pages. It was an interesting--even fascinating--read, and it never disappointed. I'll come out right away and say that I was surprised to find three or four instances of typos. The family genealogy towards the end of the book did get a bit tedious. At times Tom Junod's propensity from jumping to different scenes at the beginning of each paragraph could get a little tiring. The book, while always a page-turner, did seem a little long for what it needed to be. I'd also say that I wonder if Junod could have made a more decisive decision about his father's legacy, but I understand (even from personal experience) that that can be complicated and therefore beyond simply tying a bow on it and moving on.
Beyond all of those small negative things--I will say that I picked up this book expecting one kind of memoir. It did deliver in that regard. But the beauty of the book, or more the surprise of it, is that it morphed and turned into something completely unexpected towards the end. It's a personal story that *could have* been a fictional story, and I'm very impressed by that.
The "Greatest Generation" is one that I'll never not find fascinating. It is my grandparents' generation. It is a generation that saw great upheaval--even casual trauma sprinkled throughout family life, without batting an eye or questioning it. It is also a generation that raised one of the most entitled generations, but for a brand new, exciting, post-war world that seemed to promise endless progress and wealth (if you were white, Christian, straight...you get it).
Tom Junod's family was no exception to these rules. The book focuses on his father, Louis 'Lou' Junod, a Mad Men-era handbag salesman who carried himself with self-invented bravado, who lived by his own rules and was known by everyone around him as a vanquishing he-man and cad who could, and did, have it all. His rules were set in stone. He seemingly bent the world to his will. He philandered and took and used, and I found it almost symbolic of that generation as a whole. This was the era of post-war excess. Of the days when a firm handshake could get you a job and when you could raise a family on an even paltry salary. These were the days when women were used and discarded as readily as cigarettes (Lou Junod's storied life no exception), and you could get ahead by being...assertive. Aggressive even.
The book details Tom Junod's memories of his entire family line--all the way back to great grandparents. It explores the dynamics of his immediate family--his mother, older twin brother and sister. It explores how he was taught to grow up and the almost perpetual fear he lived with under the steady bulwark of his father's own unique rules for living. Like any family, lots of secrets were kept, created, hidden, until this youngest son paid attention and began digging. And boy do the secrets of this particular family unfold in a satisfying--almost unbelievable--way.
Without divulging too many details from this vast memoir, I will say that it really was an impressive book. If you're into family secrets and dynamics and generational studies--this is one to read. You may find yourself reminded of one of your own family members, or perhaps moved or shocked by the unfolding story of the Junods as a whole.
But anyway, this book always kept me turning pages. It was an interesting--even fascinating--read, and it never disappointed. I'll come out right away and say that I was surprised to find three or four instances of typos. The family genealogy towards the end of the book did get a bit tedious. At times Tom Junod's propensity from jumping to different scenes at the beginning of each paragraph could get a little tiring. The book, while always a page-turner, did seem a little long for what it needed to be. I'd also say that I wonder if Junod could have made a more decisive decision about his father's legacy, but I understand (even from personal experience) that that can be complicated and therefore beyond simply tying a bow on it and moving on.
Beyond all of those small negative things--I will say that I picked up this book expecting one kind of memoir. It did deliver in that regard. But the beauty of the book, or more the surprise of it, is that it morphed and turned into something completely unexpected towards the end. It's a personal story that *could have* been a fictional story, and I'm very impressed by that.
The "Greatest Generation" is one that I'll never not find fascinating. It is my grandparents' generation. It is a generation that saw great upheaval--even casual trauma sprinkled throughout family life, without batting an eye or questioning it. It is also a generation that raised one of the most entitled generations, but for a brand new, exciting, post-war world that seemed to promise endless progress and wealth (if you were white, Christian, straight...you get it).
Tom Junod's family was no exception to these rules. The book focuses on his father, Louis 'Lou' Junod, a Mad Men-era handbag salesman who carried himself with self-invented bravado, who lived by his own rules and was known by everyone around him as a vanquishing he-man and cad who could, and did, have it all. His rules were set in stone. He seemingly bent the world to his will. He philandered and took and used, and I found it almost symbolic of that generation as a whole. This was the era of post-war excess. Of the days when a firm handshake could get you a job and when you could raise a family on an even paltry salary. These were the days when women were used and discarded as readily as cigarettes (Lou Junod's storied life no exception), and you could get ahead by being...assertive. Aggressive even.
The book details Tom Junod's memories of his entire family line--all the way back to great grandparents. It explores the dynamics of his immediate family--his mother, older twin brother and sister. It explores how he was taught to grow up and the almost perpetual fear he lived with under the steady bulwark of his father's own unique rules for living. Like any family, lots of secrets were kept, created, hidden, until this youngest son paid attention and began digging. And boy do the secrets of this particular family unfold in a satisfying--almost unbelievable--way.
Without divulging too many details from this vast memoir, I will say that it really was an impressive book. If you're into family secrets and dynamics and generational studies--this is one to read. You may find yourself reminded of one of your own family members, or perhaps moved or shocked by the unfolding story of the Junods as a whole.
July 12, 2026
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (Spoilers)
3.5. 3.75? 🤨I’m still deciding how I feel about this one.
I loved the first half. The writing is sharp and glittering and often emotionally perceptive. But the last third kind of petered out even as the author starts learning crazy shit about his extended family. His great-grandmother prostituted her own daughter?! His great great aunt shot off her daughter’s finger when she fired at the daughter’s friend for “having an affair” (slash being fucking preyed upon bc I think she was a 16 and he was in his 50s) with her husband?! The women in town made her a folk hero??! I should’ve been hooked, but I started getting bored.
I kept waiting for all of these stories to coalesce into something bigger—a deeper understanding of masculinity, inheritance, fathers and sons, men and women, something. But there was no deep/satisfying universal truth reveal, for me. It kind of felt like the author assumed readers would find his father as endlessly fascinating and significant as he did. (Although to be fair, I loved hearing Junod read in his father’s voice in the audiobook—the narration is intimate and incredibly well done, and really made Lou (the father) come alive.)
Part of what felt off to me were some striking choices about what to emphasize and what to leave off the page. Junod’s brief, almost incidental mention of his own extramarital affair and his elliptical revelation that his father sexually abused his sister (and possibly son in law?) were over in a few sentences, while there are PARAGRAPHS about how much Lou Junod loved him a turtleneck.
I’m sure that imbalance was intentional rather than accidental, but I don’t know what to make of it. Was the omission itself the point? Was it illustrating the ways families minimize, compartmentalize, or look away? Or was I simply expected to infer the larger meaning without the book doing much of the work?
I don’t need a memoir to provide neat answers, but I do want it to earn its themes. By the end, I admired the writing more than I understood what it was ultimately trying to say.
3.5. 3.75? 🤨I’m still deciding how I feel about this one.
I loved the first half. The writing is sharp and glittering and often emotionally perceptive. But the last third kind of petered out even as the author starts learning crazy shit about his extended family. His great-grandmother prostituted her own daughter?! His great great aunt shot off her daughter’s finger when she fired at the daughter’s friend for “having an affair” (slash being fucking preyed upon bc I think she was a 16 and he was in his 50s) with her husband?! The women in town made her a folk hero??! I should’ve been hooked, but I started getting bored.
I kept waiting for all of these stories to coalesce into something bigger—a deeper understanding of masculinity, inheritance, fathers and sons, men and women, something. But there was no deep/satisfying universal truth reveal, for me. It kind of felt like the author assumed readers would find his father as endlessly fascinating and significant as he did. (Although to be fair, I loved hearing Junod read in his father’s voice in the audiobook—the narration is intimate and incredibly well done, and really made Lou (the father) come alive.)
Part of what felt off to me were some striking choices about what to emphasize and what to leave off the page. Junod’s brief, almost incidental mention of his own extramarital affair and his elliptical revelation that his father sexually abused his sister (and possibly son in law?) were over in a few sentences, while there are PARAGRAPHS about how much Lou Junod loved him a turtleneck.
I’m sure that imbalance was intentional rather than accidental, but I don’t know what to make of it. Was the omission itself the point? Was it illustrating the ways families minimize, compartmentalize, or look away? Or was I simply expected to infer the larger meaning without the book doing much of the work?
I don’t need a memoir to provide neat answers, but I do want it to earn its themes. By the end, I admired the writing more than I understood what it was ultimately trying to say.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 29, 2026
“He had already invented and reinvented himself. But he was about to embark on the performance of a lifetime. He was going to be a family man.”
A larger than life man, an impressionable young son yearning for love and the family secrets that will have a profound impact on his life. This is Tom Junod’s memoir. This is a book that spans decades and took many years to write. The research alone is massive. The digging, the searching, the interviewing, the writing is all a labor of love that yields an outstanding and often times, unbelievable story.
Even with some inside information (my husband is Tom’s cousin) my heart broke numerous times as I was continually shocked by all that was uncovered. Some of it is inconceivable and some of it is down right horrific…but all of it is raw, real, brave and so well put together.
This is a gripping and painful story that reveals the dynamic and dysfunction of family and the effects it has on the people kept in the dark. It is about a father/son relationship and a stark example that children are aware. They watch, they learn, they feel and they know more than they should. And they love their parent anyway.
My hope is that this book was cathartic for Tom. I think it was important to him to find out the truth after decades of secrets and lies. And while cathartic, I’m sure it was a hardship as well. Uncovering the messy components of your own family is not for the weak. Not everyone wants the truth. But we all know “the truth will set you free.” I hope you feel a sense of freedom Tommy. You deserve peace after this amazing journey and outstanding accomplishment.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
A larger than life man, an impressionable young son yearning for love and the family secrets that will have a profound impact on his life. This is Tom Junod’s memoir. This is a book that spans decades and took many years to write. The research alone is massive. The digging, the searching, the interviewing, the writing is all a labor of love that yields an outstanding and often times, unbelievable story.
Even with some inside information (my husband is Tom’s cousin) my heart broke numerous times as I was continually shocked by all that was uncovered. Some of it is inconceivable and some of it is down right horrific…but all of it is raw, real, brave and so well put together.
This is a gripping and painful story that reveals the dynamic and dysfunction of family and the effects it has on the people kept in the dark. It is about a father/son relationship and a stark example that children are aware. They watch, they learn, they feel and they know more than they should. And they love their parent anyway.
My hope is that this book was cathartic for Tom. I think it was important to him to find out the truth after decades of secrets and lies. And while cathartic, I’m sure it was a hardship as well. Uncovering the messy components of your own family is not for the weak. Not everyone wants the truth. But we all know “the truth will set you free.” I hope you feel a sense of freedom Tommy. You deserve peace after this amazing journey and outstanding accomplishment.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
April 25, 2026
In the scope of family revelations, this book is epic. Tom Junod had quite a father, Louis, a charismatic Playboy, a self-created work of male artifice, set in early sixties Mad Men terrain. He sold handbags, a traveling salesman with a woman in every trade show town. This is a parent who Tom Junod learned complicated, conflicting lessons about masculinity, though did have an equally influential experience with his enduring, much less charismatic mother. The first portions of the book detail Tom's childhood, experiencing this richly dysfunctional dynamic. Dad is indeed a colorful eccentric, but also a very messed up man. This is a book of nesting doll revelations, one layer of shocking behavior and criminality after another. It's not that these are unbelievable, but the shocks grow repetitive. Latter half of the book leans into Tom Junod's role as a journalist. He researches his genealogy, tracks down legendary figures in his life, following hunches, and finding intricately intertwined scandal in his ancestry. There are psychological layers, this section feels more distant, and again, repetitive. It's all too much. It makes sense that our own family stories are epic, and this one is more dramatic than many, but I wished it were psychologically introspective, as the project, as well-written as it is, definitely could make more room for.
July 3, 2026
4.5 stars. Could not put this down until I got to about the middle of the book when it got a little too deep into the family genealogy for me and I lost the thread. But it ended strong. There is some heavy content about his dad’s sex life that might offend some people.
He’s an amazing writer. A couple beautiful example sentences below:
But intentions matter much more than actual outcomes when my parents speak about Cathy; indeed, they are all that matter, and the legend of my sister grows up alongside my sister herself, the choking vine indistinguishable from the trellised roses.
It has a brass zipper with huge leering teeth, and when I pull the slider it makes a striptease sound, slightly embarrassing even though I am all alone.
He’s an amazing writer. A couple beautiful example sentences below:
But intentions matter much more than actual outcomes when my parents speak about Cathy; indeed, they are all that matter, and the legend of my sister grows up alongside my sister herself, the choking vine indistinguishable from the trellised roses.
It has a brass zipper with huge leering teeth, and when I pull the slider it makes a striptease sound, slightly embarrassing even though I am all alone.
April 15, 2026
Review forthcoming
July 14, 2026
Very good listen. I love when the author narrates the book, Tom did an incredible job and it was a very well written memoir.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Sun Worship, Sinatra, and the Cost of Being Seen: Reading “In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man” Now
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | March 1st, 2026
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
“Nectar…of the gods!” In newborn ocean light, Lou cups seawater like a chalice and drinks as the boy watches – awe, baptism, and the seduction of the father’s myth.
Tom Junod’s memoir, “In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man,” begins where the stories of men so often end: with a room full of people claiming they knew him. The Prologue is a funeral parlor lit by the odd glare of performance – the kind of light that makes grief feel like theater, and memory feel like testimony. The son – Junod himself – is seated close enough to the front to believe he can control the narrative. He has curated the music, the tone, the meaning. He has arranged his father’s exit the way his father arranged his entrances, with a sense of staging, a sense of “my way.” And then a woman rises – one of the father’s lovers – and delivers a line that lands like a hand on the lectern, like a gavel, like a verdict and a provocation: can we all just agree that this was a man.
It is a moment of destabilization. Not because the son doesn’t recognize the claim – he has been drafted into it his entire life – but because he recognizes the speaker. She is evidence, walking. She is a biography that does not belong to the family, and therefore cannot be managed by the family. She is the reminder that manhood, as a cultural category, is often adjudicated by spectators, not intimates; by desire, not truth; by performance, not interiority. In a time when the public life of men is forever being re-litigated – in courtrooms, on social media, in the haunted afterlives of “context” versus “cancellation” – Junod’s first move is both old-fashioned and bracingly current: he refuses to argue the case in the abstract. He goes looking for the facts, and then he goes looking for what facts cannot quite explain.
His father, Lou Junod – Big Lou, a nickname that carries the whole book’s double meaning (bigness as size, bigness as ego, bigness as appetite, bigness as myth) – is the sort of American character who feels at once specific and archetypal. A traveling handbag salesman with the aura of a celebrity, he worships the sun and the sea, Frank Sinatra and the idea of himself. He is bronzed to the point of self-invention, as if the body can be revised by exposure, as if an identity can be lacquered on. He has a private language of adjectives – “gorgeous,” “magnificent,” “built” – that turns women into architecture and weather into applause. He is convivial in the way some men are convivial as a form of dominance: he connects across rooms, he pulls people into orbit, he makes proximity feel like elevation. He is the kind of man who takes up space so fully that everyone else becomes a supporting cast.
Junod’s early chapters are exquisite in their ability to conjure this world as atmosphere – the split-level suburbs of Wantagh, Long Island; the cocktail hour as religion; the beach as Olympus; the father’s body as icon. The prose has the hot shine of memory, but also the careful chill of a narrator who knows the tricks of reverie. The sentences move the way a man like Lou moved: with swagger, with rhythm, with the confidence of someone who expects the room to listen. Yet that confidence is always counterpointed by the son’s nervousness, his sickliness, his alertness to threat. The father’s ankle cracks in the morning like a starter pistol. The father owns the mornings; the mother owns the nights. The house is divided like a small occupied city. It is a brilliant rendering of childhood as governance: you do not merely live with a parent like this, you live under him.
What gives “In the Days of My Youth…” its unusual propulsion is the way it refuses to remain a portrait. Junod is too experienced a reporter – and too canny a stylist – to settle for the static satisfactions of a strong voice recounting a formative relationship. The memoir has the forward pull of a mystery, and its central mystery is not, at first, the lurid one (how many affairs, which women, what secrets), but the quieter, more corrosive one: why did this version of manhood feel so persuasive, even sacred, to a child? Why did it imprint so deeply? Why did it take a death to make the son look back and think: I missed something essential.
Book One functions as an origin story not only for Lou, but for the son’s sense of masculinity as a script. Lou teaches as he lives: by demonstration, by maxim, by spectacle. He trains his son in the outward signs – grooming, posture, the firm handshake, the unblinking eye contact – the small rituals that turn anxiety into choreography. He also trains him in hierarchy. Manhood, in Lou’s world, is not an interior quality; it is a social position you must hold through domination, through refusal of weakness, through the conversion of desire into proof. The son absorbs these lessons the way children absorb weather: as background, as inevitability, as reality itself.
One of the memoir’s most unsettling strengths is its refusal to keep the son morally pure. Junod writes about the birth of cruelty the way he writes about the birth of longing: with clarity, with shame, with precision. A fifth-grade classroom becomes a pressure chamber. The fear of being placed among the “slow” kids threatens the boy’s sense of worth, and so he does what the culture teaches boys to do when they are about to cry: he turns outward. He finds a target. He builds a private case against a new classmate, not because the classmate deserves it, but because contempt is a quicker anesthetic than tenderness. In this moment – small, almost banal, devastating in its recognizability – Junod shows how masculinity reproduces itself: not only through fathers, but through the social economy of boys. The father’s lessons echo not as explicit instructions, but as reflex.
If Book One is the construction of the myth, Book Two is the beginning of its decomposition. Lou’s public charisma starts to reveal its private cost. The affairs – once told as stories in which the father is always the hero, always desired, always the man whose life is more interesting than anyone else’s – begin to read as repetition, as compulsion, as appetite unmoored from intimacy. The mother, too, comes into clearer focus, not as a foil but as a moral counterweight: the one who endures, who holds the household’s quiet structure together while the father treats structure as optional. The family becomes a system organized around one man’s needs, and Junod is unsparing about what such organization does to everyone else’s nervous system.
This is where the book begins to feel especially relevant to our current moment – and not in the cheap way of name-checking headlines, but in the deeper way of diagnosing a pattern that contemporary culture keeps circling. We live in an era increasingly suspicious of the charismatic man who “dominates every room,” and increasingly interested in the invisible labor that makes such dominance possible. We also live in an era fascinated by the mechanisms of self-curation: the social media persona, the brand, the myth a person builds and maintains. Lou is a pre-digital influencer of the flesh. He does not post; he performs. He does not cultivate followers; he cultivates witnesses. And as Junod’s investigation progresses, the memoir becomes a study of what happens when performance collides with archive.
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
“Kidneys” in the Kitchen: Dawn stripes the kitchen with blinds-light as Lou, ribboned in smoke, sizzles kidneys and gravy – love served warm with vigilance.
Book Three is where the book’s title begins to glow with extra meaning. “In the days of my youth I was told…” – told, not shown; told, not discovered; told, not proven. The “told” suggests doctrine, and doctrine suggests inheritance. Yet what Junod ultimately uncovers is that inheritance runs deeper than instruction. It runs through bloodlines, through omissions, through names altered and branches cut from the family tree. In the age of DNA kits and genealogical databases – when countless people discover hidden siblings, donor conceptions, old adoptions, the family secrets that were once meant to stay buried – Junod’s revelations feel eerily contemporary. He finds cousins. He finds long-suppressed histories. He finds that the self-made man is, like every man, made by others and by what those others refused to say.
There is a temptation, in memoirs that turn investigative, to treat discovery as climax. Junod is smarter than that. He understands that facts are not redemption; they are only context. Context can be clarifying, but it can also be destabilizing. It can rearrange the past without making the present easier. In some of the book’s most striking passages, Junod writes about the bodily impact of revelation – the way knowledge can knock you down, the way the nervous system responds as if to threat. The memoir is full of these physiological truths. It is not just that the son learns new information; it is that he learns it with his whole body, the way he learned his father’s presence as a boy – as crackle, as scent, as alarm.
If one were to place this book on a shelf of literary kin, it would sit comfortably among works that treat fathers not as sentimental icons but as complicated engines: Geoffrey Wolff’s “The Duke of Deception,” Tobias Wolff’s “This Boy’s Life,” Mary Karr’s “The Liars’ Club,” J. R. Moehringer’s “The Tender Bar,” Dani Shapiro’s “Inheritance.” It also carries a faint fictional echo of mid-century American male restlessness – the erotic dissatisfaction and self-mythologizing that haunt “Rabbit, Run,” or the suburban performance anxieties that shadow “Revolutionary Road.” Yet Junod’s sensibility remains distinct. He is not writing a sociological treatise, and he is not writing a revenge narrative. His gift is to hold the father’s glamour and his damage in the same palm, to show how a man can be magnetic and harmful without resorting to either sanctification or annihilation.
The question at the center of the memoir is deceptively simple: what does it mean to be a man? Lou answered it with a script: look good, dominate, desire, be desired, never appear weak. Junod answers it with an audit. He tests each inherited premise against lived consequence. He finds, repeatedly, that performance cannot substitute for intimacy, that conquest cannot substitute for self-knowledge, that charisma cannot substitute for accountability. And because he writes as a son who once wanted to be his father – and who, in small ways, became him – the book’s critique carries the weight of complicity. He is not standing outside masculinity throwing stones. He is inside it, describing the architecture from within.
That interiority is what gives the memoir its literary authority. Junod’s prose has an old pool shark’s English on its English; it is capable of comedy without becoming cute, capable of lyricism without becoming ornate. He understands that a sentence can seduce, and he also understands the danger of seduction. The book’s finest passages have a double movement: they draw you into Lou’s spell, then show you the cost of being spellbound. This is not simply a memoir about growing up with a larger-than-life father. It is a memoir about the seductions of bigness itself – the way a boy can confuse bigness with truth, and the way a culture can do the same.
What keeps the book from perfection is, paradoxically, the very exuberance that makes it so readable. Junod is a master of rhetorical accumulation, and occasionally he presses a point more than once, as if unwilling to leave an insight unillustrated. There are moments when you can feel the writer’s delight in his own cadence, in the way a phrase lands, in the way a scene can be framed for maximum impact. A slightly greater willingness to let silence do the work – to trust the reader to feel the ache without being escorted to it – would sharpen the book’s already potent restraint.
Still, the memoir’s closing movements feel earned in the way the best memoirs feel earned: not by providing catharsis, but by providing clarity. Junod does not offer a tidy absolution. He does not cancel his father, nor does he rehabilitate him into a saint of charisma. He contextualizes him – which is a different, rarer form of mercy. In the end, Lou is reduced to scale: not small, not enormous, but human. The son’s own identity shifts in response. He is no longer “number two son” auditioning for his father’s approval. He becomes the adult in the room, the one willing to hold contradiction without flinching.
The most radical thing “In the Days of My Youth…” does is not the exposure of secrets, but the redefinition of strength. In Lou’s model, strength is dominance, appetite, and certainty. In Junod’s model, strength is perception – the willingness to see what you do not want to see, including yourself. In a culture still caught between swagger and vulnerability, between performance and authenticity, between the seductions of the “alpha” and the slow work of emotional literacy, this memoir arrives as something like an antidote. It does not preach a new masculinity. It demonstrates the process of revising one.
Junod’s final achievement is to make a story about one man’s outsized life feel like a story about the lives that orbit such men – the wives who endure, the sons who absorb, the friends who flatter, the lovers who puncture the narrative at the funeral. The book suggests that manhood, for better or worse, has always been a public category: it is bestowed, contested, withdrawn. The son begins the memoir believing he can settle the matter with a eulogy. He ends it understanding that the question is not whether his father “was a man,” but what kind of manhood we are willing to celebrate, inherit, and transmit.
That is why the book lingers. Not because it exposes a philandering father – literature has done that for a century – but because it exposes the machinery of admiration. It shows how a boy becomes a witness to a performance and calls it love, how he later becomes a witness to the truth and calls it liberation. If masculinity is, as Lou believed, partly a matter of looking and being looked at, Junod’s memoir proposes an alternate economy: look closely, even when it hurts, and let the gaze become not conquest but comprehension. For a book so drenched in sunlight, it is, finally, an argument for seeing in full light – and for accepting what that light reveals. My rating: 89/100.
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
Sun Religion: On a white Westhampton deck in brutal noon glare, the family tilts toward the sun while Lou lies “entombed” in a coffin-shaped reflector, stealing fire from the sky.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | March 1st, 2026
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
“Nectar…of the gods!” In newborn ocean light, Lou cups seawater like a chalice and drinks as the boy watches – awe, baptism, and the seduction of the father’s myth.
Tom Junod’s memoir, “In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man,” begins where the stories of men so often end: with a room full of people claiming they knew him. The Prologue is a funeral parlor lit by the odd glare of performance – the kind of light that makes grief feel like theater, and memory feel like testimony. The son – Junod himself – is seated close enough to the front to believe he can control the narrative. He has curated the music, the tone, the meaning. He has arranged his father’s exit the way his father arranged his entrances, with a sense of staging, a sense of “my way.” And then a woman rises – one of the father’s lovers – and delivers a line that lands like a hand on the lectern, like a gavel, like a verdict and a provocation: can we all just agree that this was a man.
It is a moment of destabilization. Not because the son doesn’t recognize the claim – he has been drafted into it his entire life – but because he recognizes the speaker. She is evidence, walking. She is a biography that does not belong to the family, and therefore cannot be managed by the family. She is the reminder that manhood, as a cultural category, is often adjudicated by spectators, not intimates; by desire, not truth; by performance, not interiority. In a time when the public life of men is forever being re-litigated – in courtrooms, on social media, in the haunted afterlives of “context” versus “cancellation” – Junod’s first move is both old-fashioned and bracingly current: he refuses to argue the case in the abstract. He goes looking for the facts, and then he goes looking for what facts cannot quite explain.
His father, Lou Junod – Big Lou, a nickname that carries the whole book’s double meaning (bigness as size, bigness as ego, bigness as appetite, bigness as myth) – is the sort of American character who feels at once specific and archetypal. A traveling handbag salesman with the aura of a celebrity, he worships the sun and the sea, Frank Sinatra and the idea of himself. He is bronzed to the point of self-invention, as if the body can be revised by exposure, as if an identity can be lacquered on. He has a private language of adjectives – “gorgeous,” “magnificent,” “built” – that turns women into architecture and weather into applause. He is convivial in the way some men are convivial as a form of dominance: he connects across rooms, he pulls people into orbit, he makes proximity feel like elevation. He is the kind of man who takes up space so fully that everyone else becomes a supporting cast.
Junod’s early chapters are exquisite in their ability to conjure this world as atmosphere – the split-level suburbs of Wantagh, Long Island; the cocktail hour as religion; the beach as Olympus; the father’s body as icon. The prose has the hot shine of memory, but also the careful chill of a narrator who knows the tricks of reverie. The sentences move the way a man like Lou moved: with swagger, with rhythm, with the confidence of someone who expects the room to listen. Yet that confidence is always counterpointed by the son’s nervousness, his sickliness, his alertness to threat. The father’s ankle cracks in the morning like a starter pistol. The father owns the mornings; the mother owns the nights. The house is divided like a small occupied city. It is a brilliant rendering of childhood as governance: you do not merely live with a parent like this, you live under him.
What gives “In the Days of My Youth…” its unusual propulsion is the way it refuses to remain a portrait. Junod is too experienced a reporter – and too canny a stylist – to settle for the static satisfactions of a strong voice recounting a formative relationship. The memoir has the forward pull of a mystery, and its central mystery is not, at first, the lurid one (how many affairs, which women, what secrets), but the quieter, more corrosive one: why did this version of manhood feel so persuasive, even sacred, to a child? Why did it imprint so deeply? Why did it take a death to make the son look back and think: I missed something essential.
Book One functions as an origin story not only for Lou, but for the son’s sense of masculinity as a script. Lou teaches as he lives: by demonstration, by maxim, by spectacle. He trains his son in the outward signs – grooming, posture, the firm handshake, the unblinking eye contact – the small rituals that turn anxiety into choreography. He also trains him in hierarchy. Manhood, in Lou’s world, is not an interior quality; it is a social position you must hold through domination, through refusal of weakness, through the conversion of desire into proof. The son absorbs these lessons the way children absorb weather: as background, as inevitability, as reality itself.
One of the memoir’s most unsettling strengths is its refusal to keep the son morally pure. Junod writes about the birth of cruelty the way he writes about the birth of longing: with clarity, with shame, with precision. A fifth-grade classroom becomes a pressure chamber. The fear of being placed among the “slow” kids threatens the boy’s sense of worth, and so he does what the culture teaches boys to do when they are about to cry: he turns outward. He finds a target. He builds a private case against a new classmate, not because the classmate deserves it, but because contempt is a quicker anesthetic than tenderness. In this moment – small, almost banal, devastating in its recognizability – Junod shows how masculinity reproduces itself: not only through fathers, but through the social economy of boys. The father’s lessons echo not as explicit instructions, but as reflex.
If Book One is the construction of the myth, Book Two is the beginning of its decomposition. Lou’s public charisma starts to reveal its private cost. The affairs – once told as stories in which the father is always the hero, always desired, always the man whose life is more interesting than anyone else’s – begin to read as repetition, as compulsion, as appetite unmoored from intimacy. The mother, too, comes into clearer focus, not as a foil but as a moral counterweight: the one who endures, who holds the household’s quiet structure together while the father treats structure as optional. The family becomes a system organized around one man’s needs, and Junod is unsparing about what such organization does to everyone else’s nervous system.
This is where the book begins to feel especially relevant to our current moment – and not in the cheap way of name-checking headlines, but in the deeper way of diagnosing a pattern that contemporary culture keeps circling. We live in an era increasingly suspicious of the charismatic man who “dominates every room,” and increasingly interested in the invisible labor that makes such dominance possible. We also live in an era fascinated by the mechanisms of self-curation: the social media persona, the brand, the myth a person builds and maintains. Lou is a pre-digital influencer of the flesh. He does not post; he performs. He does not cultivate followers; he cultivates witnesses. And as Junod’s investigation progresses, the memoir becomes a study of what happens when performance collides with archive.
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
“Kidneys” in the Kitchen: Dawn stripes the kitchen with blinds-light as Lou, ribboned in smoke, sizzles kidneys and gravy – love served warm with vigilance.
Book Three is where the book’s title begins to glow with extra meaning. “In the days of my youth I was told…” – told, not shown; told, not discovered; told, not proven. The “told” suggests doctrine, and doctrine suggests inheritance. Yet what Junod ultimately uncovers is that inheritance runs deeper than instruction. It runs through bloodlines, through omissions, through names altered and branches cut from the family tree. In the age of DNA kits and genealogical databases – when countless people discover hidden siblings, donor conceptions, old adoptions, the family secrets that were once meant to stay buried – Junod’s revelations feel eerily contemporary. He finds cousins. He finds long-suppressed histories. He finds that the self-made man is, like every man, made by others and by what those others refused to say.
There is a temptation, in memoirs that turn investigative, to treat discovery as climax. Junod is smarter than that. He understands that facts are not redemption; they are only context. Context can be clarifying, but it can also be destabilizing. It can rearrange the past without making the present easier. In some of the book’s most striking passages, Junod writes about the bodily impact of revelation – the way knowledge can knock you down, the way the nervous system responds as if to threat. The memoir is full of these physiological truths. It is not just that the son learns new information; it is that he learns it with his whole body, the way he learned his father’s presence as a boy – as crackle, as scent, as alarm.
If one were to place this book on a shelf of literary kin, it would sit comfortably among works that treat fathers not as sentimental icons but as complicated engines: Geoffrey Wolff’s “The Duke of Deception,” Tobias Wolff’s “This Boy’s Life,” Mary Karr’s “The Liars’ Club,” J. R. Moehringer’s “The Tender Bar,” Dani Shapiro’s “Inheritance.” It also carries a faint fictional echo of mid-century American male restlessness – the erotic dissatisfaction and self-mythologizing that haunt “Rabbit, Run,” or the suburban performance anxieties that shadow “Revolutionary Road.” Yet Junod’s sensibility remains distinct. He is not writing a sociological treatise, and he is not writing a revenge narrative. His gift is to hold the father’s glamour and his damage in the same palm, to show how a man can be magnetic and harmful without resorting to either sanctification or annihilation.
The question at the center of the memoir is deceptively simple: what does it mean to be a man? Lou answered it with a script: look good, dominate, desire, be desired, never appear weak. Junod answers it with an audit. He tests each inherited premise against lived consequence. He finds, repeatedly, that performance cannot substitute for intimacy, that conquest cannot substitute for self-knowledge, that charisma cannot substitute for accountability. And because he writes as a son who once wanted to be his father – and who, in small ways, became him – the book’s critique carries the weight of complicity. He is not standing outside masculinity throwing stones. He is inside it, describing the architecture from within.
That interiority is what gives the memoir its literary authority. Junod’s prose has an old pool shark’s English on its English; it is capable of comedy without becoming cute, capable of lyricism without becoming ornate. He understands that a sentence can seduce, and he also understands the danger of seduction. The book’s finest passages have a double movement: they draw you into Lou’s spell, then show you the cost of being spellbound. This is not simply a memoir about growing up with a larger-than-life father. It is a memoir about the seductions of bigness itself – the way a boy can confuse bigness with truth, and the way a culture can do the same.
What keeps the book from perfection is, paradoxically, the very exuberance that makes it so readable. Junod is a master of rhetorical accumulation, and occasionally he presses a point more than once, as if unwilling to leave an insight unillustrated. There are moments when you can feel the writer’s delight in his own cadence, in the way a phrase lands, in the way a scene can be framed for maximum impact. A slightly greater willingness to let silence do the work – to trust the reader to feel the ache without being escorted to it – would sharpen the book’s already potent restraint.
Still, the memoir’s closing movements feel earned in the way the best memoirs feel earned: not by providing catharsis, but by providing clarity. Junod does not offer a tidy absolution. He does not cancel his father, nor does he rehabilitate him into a saint of charisma. He contextualizes him – which is a different, rarer form of mercy. In the end, Lou is reduced to scale: not small, not enormous, but human. The son’s own identity shifts in response. He is no longer “number two son” auditioning for his father’s approval. He becomes the adult in the room, the one willing to hold contradiction without flinching.
The most radical thing “In the Days of My Youth…” does is not the exposure of secrets, but the redefinition of strength. In Lou’s model, strength is dominance, appetite, and certainty. In Junod’s model, strength is perception – the willingness to see what you do not want to see, including yourself. In a culture still caught between swagger and vulnerability, between performance and authenticity, between the seductions of the “alpha” and the slow work of emotional literacy, this memoir arrives as something like an antidote. It does not preach a new masculinity. It demonstrates the process of revising one.
Junod’s final achievement is to make a story about one man’s outsized life feel like a story about the lives that orbit such men – the wives who endure, the sons who absorb, the friends who flatter, the lovers who puncture the narrative at the funeral. The book suggests that manhood, for better or worse, has always been a public category: it is bestowed, contested, withdrawn. The son begins the memoir believing he can settle the matter with a eulogy. He ends it understanding that the question is not whether his father “was a man,” but what kind of manhood we are willing to celebrate, inherit, and transmit.
That is why the book lingers. Not because it exposes a philandering father – literature has done that for a century – but because it exposes the machinery of admiration. It shows how a boy becomes a witness to a performance and calls it love, how he later becomes a witness to the truth and calls it liberation. If masculinity is, as Lou believed, partly a matter of looking and being looked at, Junod’s memoir proposes an alternate economy: look closely, even when it hurts, and let the gaze become not conquest but comprehension. For a book so drenched in sunlight, it is, finally, an argument for seeing in full light – and for accepting what that light reveals. My rating: 89/100.
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
Sun Religion: On a white Westhampton deck in brutal noon glare, the family tilts toward the sun while Lou lies “entombed” in a coffin-shaped reflector, stealing fire from the sky.
July 1, 2026
A beautifully written memoir about fathers and sons, about family secrets, and about received notions of masculinity— all told in a way that’s painfully conflicted. It leads to what may be the most devastating final line of a book that I’ve ever read. Deeply absorbing book, full of courage, compassion, and anguish.
May 8, 2026
Remarkable, not your average memoir. More of a detective story, a journey to learn the truth about his family and his father’s colorful life. Highly recommended
June 18, 2026
Memoirs are usually hard to rate, but this one is easy.
Substance-whew what a fucking scrambled mess.
Writing-whew what a fucking scrambled mess.
Substance-whew what a fucking scrambled mess.
Writing-whew what a fucking scrambled mess.
June 18, 2026
Made it 5 hours in and decided I just didnt care? Usually I like memoirs but this one doesn't do a good job of explaining the importance of any of the characters and why I should care. Very meh
May 4, 2026
Briefly: Junod is an award-winning writer looking to unravel the mystery of his father, a charismatic “man’s man.” The memoir is in three parts — part one focuses on his father, Lou Junod; part two is Lou’s decline and Junod’s coming into himself; part three is a final excavation of family.
Junod is an excellent, intriguing writer. The memoir feels like a magazine long read with lots of details and clever turns of phrase. At times, it is incredibly intimate and vulnerable, but there is also a pretense, a protection or shield that prevents it from feeling personal. Junod writes about himself, but he also writes about himself from afar — he is a professional writer who knows readers. He never feels fully honest in the way his father was never honest.
It has received outrageously strong reviews. It’s good. It’s interesting. I wouldn’t read it again. I don’t even know I’d recommend it. I d
April 6, 2026
Incredible! I’m speechless!
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