Can a Bad Man Be a Good Father?
6/21/202647 min
The writer Tom Junod has spent a career crafting profiles for men’s magazines like GQ and Esquire, often of famously complicated men like Norman Mailer, Kevin Spacey and Tony Curtis.
But another man loomed behind Junod’s interest in these figures, informing his own sense of masculinity and manhood: his father, Lou.
Lou Junod was handsome, charismatic — a man who seemed like a celebrity, even though he wasn’t famous. He was also mysterious, a keeper of secrets that have continued to reverberate through his son’s life.
On today’s episode, Michael Barbaro talks with Junod about his new book, “In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man,” which is part memoir and part detective story, as well as a powerful meditation on fatherhood.
On Today’s Episode:
Tom Junod is the author of “In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man.”
Background Reading:
Tom Junod Would Like to Tell You About His Father
Art: Lou Junod with baby Tom in 1958.
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsSpeaker 10:00
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Michael Barbaro· Host0:23
[instrumental music] From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily on Sunday. The writer Tom Junod is a student of flawed men. In a long and varied career in American magazines at places like GQ and Esquire, Tom profiled complicated figures like Norman Mailer, Kevin Spacey, and Tony Curtis. But in all of those profiles, another flawed man loomed in the background, one who informed how Tom thought about the very nature of masculinity and manhood, and that was his father, Lou, a man who had a life full of secrets. Tom's relationship with his dad is the subject of his new book, which is part memoir and part detective story. It's called In the Days of My Youth, I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man. And it's a powerful meditation on what we need from a father, what we inherit