Doubleday
Review by George Yatchisin
So something happened while I was reading Tom Junod’s In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man that never happened to me before. Junod recalls his frustrations in grammar school trying to understand an e.e. cummings poem. His mom makes him read the poem to her, aloud, so they can discuss it. Not only do these pages capture what a gentle mother she is, it allows Junod to realize she is “smartest when she feels what she’s thinking, and that’s what she doesn’t allow herself to do in front of [my father].” And the passage concludes: “He has never seen what she’s like when he’s not there. He has never seen her as I see her.” The levels of hurt sting.
Reading the three pages I’m so moved that I immediately must share them with my wife, who is patient with me and my interruption. And then halfway through my out loud reading I begin to cry—I can’t help myself I’m so moved by all the raw tenderness. It won’t be the last time the book brings me to tears, as it’s an insightful chronicle of late 20th century manhood, family, personal mythmaking, and the way we all contain multitudes of brittle resiliency. Or, to point to just one of the many great phrases Junod turns in the book, our lives are a series of “a moonshot of awkwardness and a splashdown of joy.”
In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man is a memoir as mystery, for Junod explores exactly who his father Lou Junod was. “He was a scrupulously superficial man,” is a later revelation, “believing so fervently in the magic of surfaces that his fervor almost passed for profundity and he was able to wear his soul quite literally on his sleeve, like cuff links.” The focus on Lou leads to deeper family mysteries; you almost will need to sketch a genealogy chart to keep track of who is related to whom by the book’s end. This is Tom Junod’s first book, published when he was 67. In the acknowledgements he claims he’s been working on the book all his life. He’s an acclaimed journalist, perhaps best known for his Esquire profile of Fred Rodgers that was the basis of the Tom Hanks-starring A Beautifull Day in the Neighborhood. (For some current zeitgeist frisson, Matthew Rhys—of the very haunted by past sins Widow’s Bay—played the character based on Junod.)
Junod also penned the powerful essay “The Falling Man” about the infamous photo of one of the jumpers from the World Trade Center on 9/11. His assiduous sleuthing trying to figure out who that doomed man was foreshadows this book. In that piece he writes of his digging: “But should those calls be made? Should those questions be asked? Would they only heap pain upon the already anguished? Would they be regarded as an insult to the memory of the dead, the way the Hernandez family regarded the imputation that Norberto Hernandez was the Falling Man? Or would they be regarded as steps to some act of redemptive witness?”
For Lou Junod is certainly a fallen man.Early on Tom makes clear he became a writer to finally get the last word, or last 100,000 words, as that’s what this memoir turns out to be. Lou Junod, WW II vet, talented singer, ace salesman, strong family provider (for most of his life), is also an alcoholic, a womanizer of epic proportions (bedding both Gabor sisters!), and we eventually learn perhaps something even worse. (I’m doing my best not to give away too many spoilers, promise.)
“He seems a different race,” begins one of Tom’s vivid descriptions of his father. “He is both entirely familiar and utterly foreign to me, brown as a wooden Indian, shiny as shellac, fragrant as a seraglio, and bejeweled as a satrap, with a gold bracelet, an oval ring of gold and black onyx on his pinky, and his army dog tag, cast in gold, nestled in his swirling pelt of black chest hair.” And then a bit later, that description takes on psychological and political dimensions, “It’s not simply that we’re ahistorical; it’s that our history, and indeed American history itself, begins with Lou Junod, an intensely ethnic man of no ethnicity at all, whose very skin—which he never calls brown, but ‘black’—is a varnish of self-creation.” In many ways Lou is a second half of the 20th century Jay Gatsby, right down to living on Long Island, landing in the shiny, segregated new suburb of Levittown, where he liked what he saw, “clean streets curved like smiles, houses being sold like new cars.”
Fran and Lou Junod remained married for 59 years. Fraught is perhaps too polite a word to describe what those years were like, but it helped that Lou spent much of his time on the road for his job, if only nights spent in the very-different-world Manhattan at the Essex House. The home dinner table is a locus for fear—young Tom is a sobber at any or even no provocation—to the point he even started tape recording conversations (already a journalist?) to confirm he wasn’t making things up. He writes, “Here, this is what I hear, this is what it sounds like.”
There is also the nagging fear that when Lou travels for work he might not return, especially because the road always seems to rejuvenate him. Fetching him from the airport went like this:
Strangers at JFK stare at him as if he’s…someone, which would not be so discomfiting if we did not stare at him in the same way, as if the glory of his return didn’t also announce the conditions of his return:
That we belong to him.
That he doesn’t belong to us.
Despite all the weighty events, Junod knows how to keep us reading. First, there are the lovely passages of his life with his wife, his college sweetheart. He waxes lyrical about first kisses and then an evening camped out under the meteor shower of the Perseids with “the universe putting its signature on us.” With Janet asleep in his arms, Tom speaks out loud, “Dad, you’ve never had a night like this, not once, not in your life, and you never will.”
Second, In the Days of My Youth (yes, that’s a Led Zep reference) is the kind of book where you have Usual Suspects moments over and over in the second half, and end up thinking, “Oh, that’s what was really happening in the memoir of his youth pages.” Scenes will be reappraised with new knowledge and often be transformed. To not give away too much, here’s but one example: one of Tom’s early attempts at woo is to have the at-first icy Janet read a paper he wrote praising actor George Sanders. Tom recalls his father disparaging Sanders for committing suicide and in his note claiming to “be bored.” This makes no sense to Lou, since Sanders was married to Zsa Zsa Gabor. Who, we come to learn, was a Lou Junod conquest.
Third, the book is wily enough to imitate how time is so malleable. Junod has a “trick” of starting a section in a different spot of the timeline and then backfilling details, paralleling how his discovery of his family’s wild and sordid past works during his research for the book. His skill at untying the recursive nature of lives keenly illuminates gut-punch revelations time and time again. To say Junod is “writing a book” is too, well, prosaic. He’s righting a life. Sure enough, he even lets language lead him to some freedom from his family, deciding to pronounce his name joo-KNOW as opposed to juh-NAHD. Which sure is one means of knowing.
Waiting for the results of a DNA test, Junod hopes for a family “more heroic, more tragic, more eccentric, with greater historic resonance and perhaps even a past, rich, royal, refined, ruined.” This book of redemptive witness establishes his family is all those things and more. And then the epilogue, written as a letter to his dad, rings like a lawyer’s summation to the jury, if one could be loving, if one could be both prosecution and the defense, if tears were not enough.
