IN THE DAYS OF MY YOUTH I WAS TOLD WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A MAN

A writer reckons with the legacy of his charismatic, philandering father.

Lou Junod was built like “a cross between Jack LaLanne and Victor Mature,” with a deep, dark tan and hair as “black as shoe polish,” writes his son Tom, an award-winning magazine journalist. “From Fred Astaire, he learned how to dress; from Cary Grant, how to talk; and from Clark Cable, how to treat women.” And the women? “[T]hey can’t keep their eyes off…your father,” he’d boast. A traveling handbag salesman in the 1960s and ’70s, Lou had a wife and three kids on Long Island but seemed to lead other lives, with other women, on the road in Miami, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. In the shadow of this overbearing patriarch, the author observes, the family has “no history, no family tree…no stories except the stories my father tells, about himself.” Still, the son—intimidated, often to the point of tears—is determined to investigate the mysteries of this man, beginning at age 16 with a locked Samsonite briefcase that he manages to open. (What he finds there unsettles him deeply.) The investigation becomes a vocation after Lou’s memorial service in 2006, when a former employee in his showroom—a striking Black woman named Muntu Law—ascends the pulpit and proclaims, “Can we all…just agree…that this…was a man…” The resulting book, written with both panache and feeling, circles complex truths about Lou and the family that made him the man he was. Along the way, readers get to know the author’s mother, Fran, as unnerved by Lou as their son is, and encounter a host of other characters: Lou’s formidable sisters; the longtime mistress who met an untimely end; unsuspecting strangers who may turn out to be family; even Zsa Zsa and Eva Gabor—“Really, Dad?”

An enthralling family memoir and an unromantic commentary on manhood.