How Big Was Lou? Tom Junod in Conversation with Jeff Gordinier

Join us at Village Well Books & Coffee for a conversation with Tom Junod, author of the new memoir In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man, and Jeff Gordinier, editor-at-large for Esquire.

Longtime friends Tom and Jeff will ask and answer provocative questions about fatherhood, manhood, and family secrets.

About the participants:

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. In The Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man, a memoir about his father, is his first book.

Jeff Gordinier grew up in the Pasadena area and spent 30 years contributing to magazines and newspapers in New York. His work has won a National Magazine Award, the James Beard Foundation's M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award, and a prize for food writing from the New York Press Club. He has written about poetry, music, movies, and politics, although during the past decade or so he has specialized in covering food — as a reporter for The New York Times and then as the food & drinks editor of Esquire magazine. Gordinier is the author, most recently, of the 2019 book Hungry, a portrait of the Danish chef René Redzepi, and he has published (with co-editor Marc Weingarten) a collection of essays about women in music (2015's Here She Comes Now). He also co-hosts a Los Angeles dinner series called Fun House. He lives within walking distance of Village Well.

About the book:

From two-time National Magazine Award winner Tom Junod, a searching, brilliantly stylized memoir about a charismatic, philandering father who tried to mold his son in his image, the many secrets he hid, the son’s obsessive quest to uncover them, and ultimately, the true meaning of manhood

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.” When Tom started seeing his future wife, Janet, Lou’s efforts to entice Tom into his version of manhood accelerated on nights in New York, L.A., and Paris.

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.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

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