Can a Bad Man Be a Good Father?

The writer Tom Junod has spent a career crafting profiles for men’s magazines like GQ and Esquire, often of famously complicated men like Norman Mailer, Kevin Spacey and Tony Curtis. But another man loomed behind Junod’s interest in these figures, informing his own sense of masculinity and manhood: his father, Lou. Lou Junod was handsome, charismatic — a man who seemed like a celebrity, even though he wasn’t famous. He was also mysterious, a keeper of secrets that have continued to reverberate through his son’s life. On today’s episode, Michael Barbaro talks with Junod about his new book, “In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man,” which is part memoir and part detective story, as well as a powerful meditation on fatherhood.