Lies My Father Told Me

Writer and subject: Tom and Lou Junod in 1996. Photograph by Marion Ettlinger.

By Rich Cohen

Up here, on the surface, Tom Junod’s book In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man is about his father, Big Lou Junod, a stylish, larger-than-life, Paul Bunyan figure who, in his son’s eyes, could whip any man and love every woman. It’s about the truth behind the façade, the old man’s philandering and vow-breaking, and what a boy raised by a false god can do with such a legacy.

But down below, in the depths, it’s about America, how the glamour of the 60s gave way to the 80s, the READ ON