The Monday Media Diet with Tom Junod

On Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara, Virginia Giuffre, and A Cappella books in Atlanta

Tom Junod (TJ) is one of our greatest living magazine writers. He wrote the piece Falling Man. His first book, In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man: A Memoir, is out tomorrow, March 10th.

Tell us about yourself.

I’ve spent the last 35 years writing magazine stories. I really got going during the 90s, a time that is now remembered nostalgically as The Golden Age of Magazines. And it really was! If I ever write a book about it, it will be dedicated to “the people who didn’t see the end coming.”

I write for ESPN now and am proud of the work I do -- I am definitely of the belief that the Golden Age of Magazines should last precisely as long as it takes to write your latest story. But speaking of books, I went for a long time without writing one. Indeed, I sort of wrote myself off as one of those magazine guys who never write a book -- there are lots of them, you know. But in 2015, I started researching the book I knew I had to write that was simultaneously the book I wasn’t supposed to write -- the book of my father’s and my family’s secrets. It is being published on March 10 by Doubleday, and is called “In The Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man.”

Describe your media diet.

I read a lot. But I write more than I read, even when I'm not on deadline and even when I don’t have an assignment. I’ve kept a journal for a long time, and am pretty fanatical about it. So my writing comes first, then my reading. And books come before anything else. I read in the morning and then listen in the afternoon, when I’m walking my dog, whose name is Jacques. I read one kind of book, listen to another. I read mostly novels and memoirs, listen mostly to ambitious nonfiction or classics. Listening while walking Jacques is my university.

In terms of media: I read mostly what I subscribe to: the New Yorker, the Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Paris Review. At dinnertime, I check the TV news and before I go to sleep, after writing for a while, I watch an episode of Mad Men, which has now moved to HBO. This is my fourth time watching it straight through. My father was very much like Don Draper, and so watching Mad Men gave me the courage to write my book. The first time I brought the idea of my publisher, in fact, it came with a three-word pitch:

“Bobby Draper’s memoir.”

None of which is to say that I’m innocent of social media. I had nearly weaned myself off of it when Elon Musk took my blue check away on Twitter and then when I bore down to finish my book. But one of the ironies of writing a book is that your publisher asks to you sharpen your Instagram skills so that you can sell it on a platform that is wildly post-literate and is the same time the home of many writers dancing as fast as they can to create attention for the product of all that sweat and toil.

What I’ve discovered on Instagram: those reels of people doing impressions of high-strung actors going about mundane activities. I can’t help it, I find them funny. Which the algorithm knows.

What’s the last great book you read?

I am going to be strict about this, I’m going to be literal, I’m not going to push the last important book I read, which was a book called “The Nazi Conscience,” published by Claudia Koonz in 2003. The last great book I finished two days ago, on a plane -- “Lunch Poems” by Frank O’Hara. The beauty of the book is that Frank O’Hara supposedly wrote every poem during his lunch hour, and you can read it exactly how it was written -- you can keep the book in your pocket and just open it up when you feel like it and close it when you think you’re done. It’s fun, and meant to be. It’s full of throwaway lines that stay with you and some of the most beautiful lines for a person who has just written a book:

“but it is good to be several floors up

in the dead of night

wondering whether you are any good or not

and the only decision that you can make is that you did it.”

What are you reading now?

It’s interesting how writing books changes how you read them. I used to go by Randall Jeffers’ advice -- “Read at whim! Read at whim!” But when you write a book you ask so much of so many people you wind up reading out of friendship and gratitude. So right now I’m reading a new novel by Erin L McCoy, a young writer whom I met back in October at a Doubleday event. The book is called “Underlake,” and it’s about people who live under a lake that flooded their village. It’s beautifully written -- Erin is a poet, and there is clenched music in every line -- and constructs not just a story but a new, murky world.

And I’m listening to the late Virginia Giuffre’s memoir, “Nobody’s Girl,” which was written with my friend Amy Wallace. After Virginia ended her own life, Amy took on the duty of representing her in the media and has spoken to everyone everywhere with dignity, purpose, courage and power. She has been, to my mind, heroic. I’m in awe of her.

I’m also reading “Only Sing,” a collection of John Berryman’s uncollected Dream Songs. I try to read a poem or two before I fall asleep.

Good luck with that!

What’s your reading strategy when you pick up a print copy of your favorite publication?

I read back to front, always. I start with the reviews. I know reviews are supposed to be inessential and criticism is supposed to be dead but I really like reading them. I’m a sucker for Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker because he writes so aphoristically and because he’s particularly smart on the subject of religion, my nonfiction obsession.

Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?

I’ve always fantasized about working in a bookstore. So now that I’ve written a book I’ve convinced A Cappella books in Atlanta, a small store that has made itself essential to the writing and reading life in Atlanta, to take me on as a clerk for one day a couple of weeks from now, March 21. The owner, Frank Reiss, has asked what book I want to sell besides my own, and I told him to get as many copies as he can of Joe Brainard’s “I Remember.” It’s a slim book that consists of nothing but sentences that begin with the words “I remember.” They seem offhand and incredibly random: “I remember Dole pineapple rings on a bed of lettuce with cottage cheese on top and sometimes a cherry on top of that.” But they add up with incredible accumulative power, and I have to think that everyone who reads the book will finish it thinking they’re going to write one just like it -- I know I did.

But nobody does. I suspect nobody can.

What is the best non-famous app you love on your phone?

Brian Eno created an app for the iPhone a long time ago called Bloom. Now, I’m a huge Brian Eno fan, he changed the way I listened to music when the way I listened to music was due for a change, and I think he might be the smartest person in the world. I’ve seen his movie Eno -- which re-edits itself with every viewing -- seven times and Bloom allows you to approximate the generative ambient music that Eno pioneered. I’m anti-AI, I reject and resist it. But who am I kidding? I knew AI when it was just the gleam in Brian Eno’s eye.

[Note, Joe Brainard style: I remember when people used to tell children “I knew you when you were just the gleam in your father’s eye.”]

Plane or train?

I wouldn’t call myself an aficionado of air travel. But I get claustrophobic on trains. The last time I went for a long trip on a train I caught the flu and I felt like Uma Thurman in “Kill Bill,” when she started punching her way out of the coffin.

What is one place everyone should visit?

Jones Beach on Long Island. I grew up there, in Wantagh, “The Gateway to Jones Beach.” But it’s not just that I used to work there and hitchhike there. It’s this giant public beach brought into being by Robert Moses. It’s cheap, and when you go off season it’s free. You walk the boardwalk, you hear Long Islanders being funny without even intending to -- Long Islanders are the funniest people in the world. You walk down to the ocean, and you hear seagulls sounding like Long Islanders. The wind sculpts the sand and waves crash and planes fly overhead back and forth to JFK and there’s always some guy with a metal detector finding jackpot pocket change. You can see NYC if you squint but you feel very much left to your own devices there and at the same time very much part of something venerable and grand -- a public works project that puts the ocean within reach of every person on Long Island. Robert Moses was no hero but at least he did this.

Tell us the story of a rabbit hole you fell deep into.

In 1983, I became an inaugural subscriber to the Library of America, which -- speaking of public works projects -- seeks to publish uniform editions of America’s literary legacy...or something like that. I was in, and I never got out, and while the Library of America has done what it set out to do, expanding and changing how I read, I now have hundreds of beautiful volumes, each of which contains four or five books -- for example, “Jack Kerouac: Road Novels 1957-1960.” I will never finish them. I will never come close. They outnumber me. They’ve got me surrounded. They are an amazing luxury and yet because they are uniform editions I can use them to build a foundation for a new house if it comes to that. That’s the advantage I guess, of falling into an analog rabbit hole, rather than a digital one.