Few writers have spent as much time adeptly probing the complexities of masculinity — and the contradictions of the men who shape us — as journalist Tom Junod. In his new memoir, In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man, he turns that same unflinching lens inward, examining his larger-than-life father who both captivated and wounded those around him — and the lasting imprint that relationship left on Junod’s understanding of identity, truth, and love.
What emerges is a deeply personal reckoning that resists easy conclusions. In this conversation, Junod reflects on the emotional cost of telling family truths, the quiet power of secrets, and the long arc of empathy — how it’s learned, tested, and ultimately earned. It’s a story about fathers and sons, but also about the stories we inherit, the ones we carry in silence, and what happens when we finally decide to tell them.
Katie Couric Media: You’ve spent a career interrogating other people’s lives, often with empathy. How did your reporter's instincts help you uncover the truth about your dad?
Tom Junod: Well, I'd been uncovering truths about Lou Junod since I was a child. The family snoop, the family spy, the family investigative reporter — I was all of those things, and what I discovered, even then, had the power to shake me to my bones. But it was not something I felt free to talk about, to report to other members of my family, so what I discovered, what I found out, was knowledge I had to bear alone. I write very little about my career as a journalist in In The Days Of My Youth I Was Told What It Means To Be A Man. But it's pretty clear that whatever inclinations I have as a journalist and a writer were forged at the family dinner table.
Now fast-forward to the present, or at least to the afternoon in 2015 when I decided to write a memoir. It was not exactly a moment of truth. It was a moment when I decided to tell the truth, whatever the consequences. So the first thing I had to do when I was writing my book was give myself the permission to write it. The second thing was to find a way to tell it. I knew, in advance, that I was going to proceed into emotionally difficult territory and that I was going to demand the truth from the people I was going to talk to. But how was I going to do that without hurting those whose stories I was setting out to tell?
It took me nine years to figure that out. When I began, I didn't know what I sounded like on the page, nor what I wanted to sound like. Did I want to write an angry memoir? A bitter memoir? A score-settling memoir? No, I didn't want to write any of those things. What then? The answer only came to me when, five years in, I began to write from the point of a view of a child — when I began to write out of fear, out of awe, out of helplessness, and out of love.
I take it as a great compliment, when you say that over the course of my career, I interrogate people's lives with empathy. But I think in this case, in the case of the book, empathy is something I learned as I went along — something I learned as I learned about my father and my family. Empathy seems very adult, very poised, the grownup emotion I had to grow into. After all, I wasn't just empathetic toward my father, my mother, my brother, my sisters, my great coven of Levittown aunts. I loved them. The book began when I realized I wasn't going to change that, that after all these years I was helpless to change that, and so I had to honor it. It is a book about my father, yes. But more than that, it's a book about love.
Your father’s charisma seems to have had a special gravitational pull on women, even when it caused real harm. As a child watching that dynamic, what did you internalize about the way men are allowed to move through the world, and the space women are expected to hold for them?
What I internalized was the overwhelming fact that there were other women in my father's life, that they made a fuss over him as he made a fuss over them, and that he treated them more lovingly than he treated the woman I loved, which was my mother. That was the roaring battleground where the little pup tent of my childhood was set up, and so I don't know if I had the wherewithal to internalize the way men move through the world. I was more concerned about the way a particular man moved through the world, Lou Junod.
This is not to say that my father's example didn't affect how I thought about manhood, both in general and my own. This is to say that it was all very personal, an existential question upon which hinged my very existence. My father made other women swoon. He made my mother cry. Was I obligated to follow in those footsteps? What if I couldn't? What if I didn't want to? Was I still a man? And what did success and failure even mean when my role model lived for pleasure and also caused pain?
The memoir suggests that secrecy wasn’t just incidental in your family: it was structural, almost a way of life. Do you think that the process of uncovering those secrets ultimately brought you closer to your parents?
The most important thing I've ever heard about secrets came from a man I knew when I was on the board of my daughter's school. We had gone on a board retreat, and I began talking about the book I had just started to write. I told him about one of my family's secrets, and he said, "And I'll bet nobody had to tell you not to say anything about that, right? It's just something you knew without anyone saying a word."
He was exactly right, of course, and he had given me an education in how secrets work. Nobody has to say a word, because secrets are about not saying a word, or the words. They are an entire language of silence, a code common to all families and at the same unique to each one. My family was not a quiet family, was not a family cowed into silence. We were loud, talkative, with everybody given permission to argue about whether Tony Bennett wore a toupee. We just didn't talk about the obvious, which was that my father had an entire life outside our supposedly happy home. We just didn't talk about that.
What the book taught me — what my research for the book taught me — was that my family's secrets went back generations. There were things I knew about my family that I also knew I couldn't talk about? Well, when my father was growing up in Brooklyn, there were things he knew about his family that he knew better than to talk about. When he was 16, his beloved mother was identified as an adulteress as part of a scandalous murder that was on the front page of New York's tabloid newspapers for months. When I was 16, I opened my father's briefcase and found conclusive evidence of his secret life. He never spoke about what happened and how the experience affected him. I just did, in a book. Did that make me closer to him? It made me understand him better, and what it made me understand was that he wasn't just "a man" — he was once a boy, and, like me, he grew into a human being.
There’s a tension throughout the book between revelation and betrayal — the idea that telling the truth about someone you love can feel like a kind of violence. After writing this, do you believe that a search for the truth is always worth the potential costs?
I can't speak for everyone, and always is always a dangerous word. But I can say when you grow up in a house of secrets, you're always afraid of what's on the other side of them. What happens if and when I tell? When secrets are locked in your mouth, they stay there because you believe they possess an annihilating force. You believe they are dangerous. You believe that they place the world you love at great risk. And you believe that if you speak them, the people you love won't love you anymore. This is the violence to which you refer in your question. And I can't say, to anyone, that this is wrong, that their fears are unfounded. Secrets are dangerous, because of the power we assign them. Revealing them seems like a risky course of action because, well, it is.
For instance, when I was 16, I figured out the combination of my father's briefcase and gained, in an instant, the power to end my parents' marriage. That's when I realized that secrets were power, because it wasn't a power I was ready for, or even wanted. So it took me another, oh, 50 years to write about it and therefore to talk about it. But now I find myself in the place I always wondered about, the place on the other side of secrets. I might not be able to tell everyone that the truth is always worth the costs. But I can say what it's like, when the cat is finally out of the bag. And it's this: I was right about secrets, in that revealing them can cause pain and come at great cost. But I was wrong about them, in that they didn't come at the cost of love. The people who loved me still love me. And that has given me a great deal of strength, following the publication of the book. Here was the thing I was afraid to say and here I am saying it, and the world didn't end. I'm still here. So is my family.
Your father tried to shape you in his image, yet this book feels like a reclamation of your own identity. After this reckoning of sorts, what do you now believe actually defines a man?
A lot of my friends, as well as a lot of my father's younger colleagues in the handbag business, have told me something about my father that I, as his son, could only observe from afar: "You know, your Dad took an interest in me. He always asked me how I was doing. He was always curious about my life."
It's something my Dad never told me about — he was too busy teaching me how to clean my navel to have the time to teach me to ask people how they are doing. But I think I absorbed some of that, and it's stood me in good stead my entire life, both professional and personal. And now that the book has been published, and people are responding to it, often in a very personal way, I see more clearly than ever that I like that part of my father's legacy. I like people, I like talking to people, I like responding to people who reach out to me in response to the book. My father could be cruel, and so could I. And for that reason — my success at emulating his cruelty and my difficulty emulating his sex appeal — I spent a lot of time thinking I was a bad guy. Well, I'm not. I'm just a guy who, at certain times in my life, had it all wrong.
My father was a powerful man. But he didn't have the power to be his best self. He didn't have the power to be honest and he didn't have the power to put his kindness at the heart of his being. I have come to believe — to accept — that manhood is an ideal, and the ideal asks us to be strong. But I believe that real men have the strength to do the hard things: to tell the truth, to be kind, to care about people, to be accountable. It sounds old-fashioned, almost Boy-Scoutish, and one thing is certain: my father was not a Boy Scout, and neither am I. But we see every day the consequences of men thinking that manhood is nothing more than a method of getting away with all manner of malfeasance — a Get Out of Jail for Free card. It's not. It should be better than that. We should be better than that. I should be better than that.
The title of your book is borrowed from a line in "Good Times Bad Times," a Led Zeppelin song. Is that your favorite song by them?
I didn't pick the first line of the first song of Led Zeppelin's first album as the title of my book. My editor, Bill Thomas, did. But as soon as he proposed it to me, I remembered something and recognized something. What I remembered: "Good Times Bad Times" was the soundtrack of my life when at "sweet 16 I fell in love with a girl as sweet as could be." What I recognized: It was not only a line from "Good Times Bad Times." It was the literal story of my life. In the days of my youth, I really was told what it means to be a man. No joke!
That said, "Good Times Bad Times" is not my favorite Led Zeppelin song. That honor goes to "Immigrant Song," which, for its violence, audacity, recklessness, relentlessness, is like no other song in the Led Zeppelin canon, perhaps like no other song ever recorded. It's not as catchy as "Good Times Bad Times" or as strange and beautiful as "The Battle of Evermore" or as heavy as "When the Levee Breaks" or as hubba-hubba as "Whole Lotta Love." But it howls. And it seems impossible to me. And it never fails to blow the top of my head off.
