The Creative Nonfiction Podcast with Brendan O'Meara Episode 516: Tom Junod Wrote One of the Best Memoirs You'll Ever Read
"A book is not a long magazine article, and it took me a long, long time to understand that, to even understand what it means. It's something that you can say, but you have to live it to understand it," says Tom Junod, author of the memoir In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to be a Man.
Wow, look who visited the digital CNF Pod HQ: It’s Tom Junod.
Listen, I don’t have all day to sing the praises and list the back-of-the-baseball-card details of Tom’s illustrious career writing for GQ, Esquire, and ESPN. He’s a two-time winner of the National Magazine Award. His piece in Esquire titled The Falling Man is a re-read for many of us around 9/11 and it takes a meditative and reportorial look at the man who had not chosen his fate, but appeared to embrace it. Tom wrote the iconic profile of Fred Rodgers that was turned a movie starring Tom Hanks. In many ways, so much of Tom’s work is writing about father figures, which of course brings us to the ultimate: In The Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to be a Man, a memoir about his father. It’s published by Double Day.
Tom can be found on Instagram @tom_junod and on the Facebooks and stuff. Google his work to read wildly ambitious stories from that particularly crazy era that was pre-internet magazine culture. Dude was in a watch ad.
In this episode:
- We talk about that watch ad
- The Mountain of writing a book
- The difference between writing a magazine story vs. a book
- The no nut-graf philosophy
- Saying yes
- Telling his life story from the work he does about other lives
- The one arrow in his quiver
- How there should be principles in journalism, but no rules
- Writing beginnings that hint at the ending
- Writing before referring to notes
- And combining love and truth telling in his memoir
Really an amazing conversation.
Promotional support: The 2026 Power of Narrative Conference. Use narrative20 at checkout for 20% off your tuition. Visit combeyond.bu.edu.
Show notes: brendanomeara.com