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

“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 “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 “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