A Review of "In the Days My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man" by Tom Junod

 So something happened while I was reading Tom Junod’s In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man that never happened to me before. Junod recalls his frustrations in grammar school trying to understand an e.e. cummings poem. His mom makes him read the poem to her, aloud, so they can discuss it. Not only do these pages capture what a gentle mother she is, it allows Junod to realize she is “smartest when she feels what she’s thinking, and that’s what she doesn’t allow herself to do in front of [my father].” And the passage concludes: “He has never seen what she’s like when he’s not there. He has never seen her as I see her.” The levels of hurt sting.

Reading the three pages I’m so moved that I immediately must share them with my wife, who is patient with me and my interruption. And then halfway through my out loud reading I begin to cry—I can’t help myself I’m so moved by all the raw tenderness. It won’t be the last time the book brings me to tears, as it’s an insightful chronicle of late 20th century manhood, family, personal mythmaking, and the way we all contain multitudes of brittle resiliency. Or, to point to just one of the many great phrases Junod turns in the book, our lives are a series of “a moonshot of awkwardness and a splashdown of joy.”

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.