An Evening with Tom Junod in conversation with Don Van Natta Jr.

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Big Lou Junod dominated every room he entered. He worshipped the sun and the sea, his own bronzed body, Frank Sinatra, and beautiful women. He was a successful traveling handbag salesman who carried himself like a celebrity. He’d return from the road with stories of going to nightclubs where the stars—Ava Gardner, maybe Liz Taylor—“couldn’t keep their eyes off . . . your father.” He had countless affairs and didn’t do much to hide them.
Lou could be cruel to Fran, his wife of fifty-nine years, but he loved his youngest son. Tom was a skin-and-bones, nervous boy, devoted to his mother, but Lou sought to turn him into a version of himself. He showered him with advice about how to dress (“A turtleneck is the most flattering thing a man can wear”), how to be an alpha male, and especially, how to attract and bed women. His parting speech when Tom went to college was: “Do yourself a favor and date a Jewish girl. They’re all nymphos.”
Tom wrestled with Lou’s imposing presence all his life. When one of Lou’s mistresses stood up at his funeral and announced, “Can we all . . . just agree . . . that this . . . was a man,” Tom set off to learn the facts of his father’s life, and why he was the way he was. The stunning secrets he uncovered—about his father, his father’s lovers, and deceptions going back generations—staggered Tom, but in the process allowed him, at last, to become his own man, by his own lights.
In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man is an intensely emotional detective story powered by a series of cascading revelations. The book is a triumph of bravura writing; it is a tale of a son reckoning with the consequences of his father’s life, and in the end, the story of the son’s redemption.

TOM JUNOD is senior writer for ESPN, where his work has won an Emmy and the Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sportswriting. He is a two-time winner of the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, and a winner of the James Beard Award for essay writing. Previously he was a staff writer at GQ and Esquire. The film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood was based on his article in Esquire. He lives in Atlanta with his wife and daughter.

Don Van Natta Jr. is an investigative reporter whose work appears across ESPN platforms including SportsCenter, Outside the Lines and ESPN.com.
Since joining ESPN in January 2012, Van Natta has done cross-platform, investigative stories about scandals embroiling the National Football League, Commissioner Roger Goodell, Penn State University, Rutgers University, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred and others. Besides his written work, he is often featured on Outside the Lines, the network’s Emmy-award winning investigative series.
Van Natta’s long-form articles were anthologized four consecutive years in The Best American Sports Writing series and in 2018, a series of stories about the NFL that he co-wrote with ESPN senior writer Seth Wickersham was a finalist for a National Magazine Award. In 2016 the Society of Professional Journalists named Van Natta a “Fellow of the Society,” the organization’s highest professional honor awarded for “extraordinary contribution” to the journalism profession.
Van Natta also hosted the ESPN program Backstory from 2019 to 2021. The episodes of the program are available for on-demand viewing on ESPN+.

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