Tom Junod has written a new memoir about his father, and about the long, uneasy work of understanding what that father left behind. In In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man, Junod turns the story back on himself, tracing the imprint Lou Junod had on his sense of identity, truth and love.
Junod said he had been uncovering truths about Lou since he was a child. By 2015, he had decided to write a memoir, but it took him nine years to figure out how to do it. Five years into the process, he began writing from the point of view of a child, a shift that helped him get closer to the emotional center of the book.
The memoir fits a career in which Junod has spent much of his time probing masculinity and the contradictions of the men who shape us. This time, though, the subject was not an interview subject or a public figure. It was his own family, and the complicated bond at the center of it.
Junod said he did not want to write an angry memoir, a bitter memoir or a score-settling memoir. He said the book began when he realized he was helpless to change what he felt for his father, mother, brother, sisters and the Levittown aunts who were part of that world. “I wasn’t just empathetic toward my father, my mother, my brother, my sisters, my great coven of Levittown aunts. I loved them,” he said.
That is what gives the memoir its shape. Junod is not trying to win an argument with the past. He is trying to tell the truth about a family he could not stop loving, even as he kept learning what that love cost him and what it taught him. The book’s question is not whether he has finally solved his father. It is whether he can write honestly about him without turning away from the affection that made the reckoning possible in the first place.
