Joe McGinniss Jr., DAMAGED PEOPLE: A Memoir of Fathers and Sons

[1:31]Zibby Owens: Hi. This is Zibby Owens, and you're listening to Totally Booked with Zibby. Formerly, moms don't have time to read books. In my daily show, I interview today's latest best selling, buzziest, or underrated authors and story creators whose work I think is worth your time. As a bookstore owner, publisher, author, and obviously podcaster, I get a comprehensive look at everything that's coming out and spend my time curating the best books so you don't have to. Stay in the know, get insider insights, and connect with guests like I do every single day. For more information, go to zibbymedia.com, and follow me on Instagram at zibby owens. Joe McGinnis junior is the author of damaged people, a memoir of fathers and sons. He is also the author of carousel court and the delivery man. Joe lives in Washington DC with his family. Welcome, Joe. Thank you so much for coming on Totally Booked to talk about damaged people, a memoir of fathers and sons. Congratulations. Thanks, Sydney. Very nice of you to have me. Oh, it's my pleasure. I really enjoyed your book. It was tough at times, what your dad was going through, the difficult relationship with you and your son at times, your own growth. I mean, there's a lot in here. All the ups and downs of your dad's publishing journey,

[2:52]Joe McGinniss Jr.: all of it. There's a lot, and it was it was it was quite moving. So thank you for sharing it all. Well, thank you for for indulging it. It was not it was not an easy book to write. I bet. Yeah. My father was, you know, he was a trailblazer. He really he he was a maverick, and he just sort of started out his life knowing exactly what he wanted to do at the youngest age and did it at the highest level

[3:18]Zibby Owens: from out of the gate with the selling of the president. So wait. Take listeners back and explain who your dad was for those who weren't familiar with his work and what it was like sort of watching the ebbs and flows of his success and what that did to you and your your family.

[3:34]Joe McGinniss Jr.: Oh my god. Yeah. So he was Joe McGinnis, and he was a journalist, And he wrote a book called The Selling of the President. And it was about Richard Nixon's media campaign in 1968 featuring Roger Ailes. It became a New York Times bestseller. Thirty one weeks, number one, it was next to Diary of Anne Frank as the youngest person to have a bestseller in for that long. And it set his career. It just it it launched him. He was on The Tonight Show. He was traveling the country, traveling the world. And meanwhile, he had a wife at home with two daughters and me on the way, and he became just sort of kind of like a literary rock star. And it was he he was just everybody wanted a piece of him. And he'd come home, and he had to take the garbage out. And he'd have to be a father and be responsible and and shut it down somehow and shift gears, and that was something he was not prepared to do. And so he left. And he left just far enough away so that he could sort of live his life and not have to, like, worry about the kid popping in on a Tuesday after school or, you know, helping with homework or whatever. Was just like, look, I need my space. Now, he was really young, and this was a different era, but it still really screwed us up. I mean, it was

[5:00]Zibby Owens: hard to cope with. And then, of course, you have to be not of course, but and then you were sort of trotted out as the the idyllic kids for photoshoots.

[5:09]Joe McGinniss Jr.: Oh, sure. And

[5:10]Zibby Owens: having to just put on a happy face.

[5:13]Joe McGinniss Jr.: Yeah. We would go visit for the weekend, and it just so happened that someone was doing a profile of him for his upcoming book. And we were there. I don't know if it was coincidence, but, you know, the thing with my dad, he was so warm. He was so affectionate. He was so funny. He would give big hugs. He read to us. He played with us. He camped out in the yard with me. I mean, he he loved being a father when he wanted to be, when he was prepared to be, which seemed to be about, I don't know, one weekend a month and a few weeks in the summer. And he would write nice letters and he would call on Sundays. And, you know, so growing up, we kind of like, it was this was just life. And, of course, our mother was the hero because she was working a full time job as a nurse and raising the three of us in the seventies. And somehow, despite being damaged people, we all pretty much did pretty well. I mean, we we raised beautiful kids and and empathetic kids and and we are empathetic and we we are we love each other and we have our issues, but we we aren't these, like, jaded cynics who have all this anger. We we we get it. We understand that he was human. He had his frailties. It's taken us a lifetime to sort of try to process what was going on inside his head because he came from some pretty intense genes. I mean, his gene pool was not exactly it was Irish, it was depressed, it was alcoholic, it was lonely, it was stifled and Catholic, and so he had a lot to contend with, and he was an only child, so it wasn't like he had siblings to lean on and process, And so he took on the world both emotionally and professionally. To that, for that, I'm so proud and impressed with what he was able to do and the kind of father he was able to be despite growing up with a cold aloof alcoholic father. He became this joyous, loving man Mhmm. But just had no control over his appetites and his compulsions and his ambition. So he was he was kinda like a we compare it to like a five category five hurricane. Mhmm. And so we're all but it's in the house. And so you're just sort of like, you wanna be in the eye of the storm, but you know the wall is coming and you're gonna get hit and you're gonna get tossed around. So he was he was a lot to contend with.

[8:04]Zibby Owens: Well, not to mention, you know, all the all the things he got into later in life and his constant drinking and taking it for the weekend and stopping for alcohol. I mean, on the one hand, when you hear like, oh, our dad left and he could only be a dad a little bit of the time. It's like, oh, that's terrible. But then you think about it, like, is this a man who theoretically knew his own limits and tried to put himself in a position to succeed even though it didn't look like what a traditional family structure might look like or what you might have wanted. Like, maybe this was the way he put himself forward the best he could. Absolutely.

[8:43]Joe McGinniss Jr.: I mean, there's absolutely a lot to be said for that. The the notion that he knew exactly what you said, he knew I'm gonna do more harm than good Mhmm. If I'm in town Mhmm. In a different house because I can't control my appetites right now. Mhmm. And I know if I'm sitting here having a bad day writing and I decide to have a few drinks because I'm feeling it, and my kids pop in, that's not gonna go well. Now, the issue that I came up with, the problem I had with this later on, I still have contention with my half brother and my stepmother. Yep. Because they're of the mindset that, hey, it's a disease, And there was only so much that he could do. He was powerless against it. You know, at a certain point, decades into it, with all the resources, all the money, all the expertise, all the time to devote to say, like, let me take this head on. Let me try to figure out what my demons are Mhmm. And deal with them Mhmm. Head on. That never happened. Mhmm. He never had the ability or the willingness to do that. And he had a chance with kids under his roof with my half brothers to start from scratch and say, hey, I'm here every day. And I moved there. I lived with him for two years when I was 13 because I wanted some time with my dad. So he knew what it's like to be a present. He was wonderful. Mean, don't get me wrong. No. No. I get it. It was not a house of horrors in Williamstown, Massachusetts. It was like it was like, oh my god. This is amazing. I mean, was wonderful. Now, except for dinnertime when he drank, which was every night, and so you had to watch him kinda fade out. And I I I watched your wonderful, and I've gotta read Lily King's new novel. But she's just amazing in her story with her father. And I was listening to her speak with you and just talking about the signs, the physical symptoms. He would start to perspire. His face would start to get a little red. He would sigh more. And this was every night. And I would watch my father reach for the second bottle of wine at the table. And he was the only one at the table drinking. So and this was after the gin and after the beer. And I'm 13 and I'm sitting there like, ugh, you know, I hate this. Mhmm. Like, I hate watching this. What's wrong? Now, he had the chance with kids under the roof to be a present father, take this stuff on. And he didn't. And it's he's like a lot of people who who were they were rock stars, they were superstars. They they knew they knew power and fame early. It was their show. Mhmm. And and and they bore all responsibility. And with that came some liberty, some freedom to just be and and not have to really answer to anyone. And so no one really ever I mean, I kinda but it's one of my regrets is that we never did try to intervene in a formal way.

[11:54]Zibby Owens: Like, no interventions don't always stick. Yeah. I was like, I don't feel like that would have gone over that well with him. Oh god. No.

[12:03]Joe McGinniss Jr.: Don't get me wrong. It would have been a disaster in the moment. Mhmm. But there were I just I kinda wish we had been more unified and and consistent Mhmm. With our approach to him. But he was he was so he was so tough to sort of, like, to take head on because he was so smart and and just so cynical. And he had this Larry David speak in him, and he would break it down and take it, you know, just sort of make a you know, just he was just he was a force of nature. And at a certain point, we just sort of had to, I don't know, build our storm shelters and just kind of like ride it out when we could and otherwise stick our heads up. It's whatever.

[12:49]Zibby Owens: I love how you then fast forward to you as new dad, you as dad sort of in the teenage years. You talk about this period where you had a depress a depressive episode and your dad actually reached out to you about it and, you know, discussed his tendencies and you had to get treatment and and all of that. And you did, which is like how the two roads diverged. Right? Like, you took the risk this one way and he took another untreated way. And what does that mean essentially?

[13:17]Joe McGinniss Jr.: Exactly. Like, he's self medicated. Mhmm. He went to he tried therapy for a long time and and it didn't stick. You know, we have a long family history of Lexapro as our sort of go to low dose Lexapro. That's fine. We're Irish. We get it. But, like, with him, it was I I think the drinking really screwed him up. Like, it it made it so much harder to contend with the sort of depressive episodes or just the melancholy because that that that way of self medicating, obviously, was so destructive and got in the way. I never drank. Having watched and drank, it terrified me. So I never had a sip. And that that I'm fortunate that I never did. And so when I was, like, having this with my son, he was, like, three years old and everything was just so glorious. We had a yellow lab. My book was out. My wife was healthy and and loving work and life was just charmed. I was like, this is too good. Something's gotta give. And I was just like a mess. I was like, I can't I can't be without my son because it's just too good. And so I talked to somebody and he was like, you gotta try this Lexapro. Well, it was Effexor was the first thing, very low dose. And I was like, this is no good. And then he's like, try Lexapro. It's like, oh, okay. My mom's on Lexapro. My sister's on Lexapro. My brother's on Lexapro. So it was like, this is our family drug. And I was like, cool. All right, this is great. And from that point forward, I was like, all right, I get it. This is my gene pool. This is my brain chemistry. And this is my son and my life, and this is pretty freaking awesome. And so, you're right. The the paths diverged, and I was so fortunate to have been able to observe my father. Mhmm. See what he did right and what he got right, and then what he tragically got so wrong, and actually try to take from that and do a little bit better. And then you take us into your relationship with Jason

[15:25]Zibby Owens: and how you really beat yourself up for this one moment in the car. Like, this this whole book is like an apology to Jason for this terrible day in the car. Wow. Look. You know? And all parents make mistakes. You know? I mean, it was like one minute. I was, like, yelling on the way to school this morning. It's like you you just like in the moment, sometimes you're just like, ah.

[15:48]Joe McGinniss Jr.: I know. It was it was it was tough, man. It was it was post COVID and and he was 14 and he was a basketball prodigy and superstar and it was AAU, but he was sort of he was on his phone all the time and he was going know, he was just not working hard because he kept saying to me, I wanna play college basketball. I wanna be division one. And every time we check-in with him every season, he's sure he wouldn't do this. If you do it, there's a certain way you gotta do it. Mhmm. Because we're in the DMV, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia. It's like the hotbed of basketball. Like Mhmm. Oh my god. The the competitiveness is through the roof. So you gotta go out there, and you gotta bring a certain edge and swagger. And he is an introspective, sweet, sensitive, he's our child, and yet he's got this amazing talent. And so it was like these he had, like, the angel and the devil, and he's gotta indulge the devil when he goes out there, but he's a little angel. But we're like, dude, you gotta bring it. And so he goes out there kinda, like, lazily. He's been on his phone, and that's our fault. But I just was like, I can't take this, man. Like, how many times do we have to drive an hour and a half to watch you go out there and go through the motions for something you say you love? Now you're 14. You're not nine or eight. It's like go time. What are you gonna do? Who do you wanna be? And so, yeah. It's like, I kinda lost. I kinda I was like, dude, this is no good. And it's the damn phone. I was like blaming the phone. It's like this phone, what do we do? But, you know, look, that's the that was the downside of sort of an overinvestment. And I kinda in writing this memoir, I kinda discovered that. For me, that thread of my father, that intensity, that sort of com not compulsion, but as a father, I was all in. I was hooked. It was kinda like my high. He was my high. Like, every day after school watching him play and playing goalies so he could take shots on me and playing quarterback while they play football and bringing his snacks. And it was just like being a writer is awesome because I get to watch and help my son grow up. And I was hooked. And the moment he sort of became a teenager and became real and became vulnerable and wasn't just this constant high for me. He became a challenge. He needed help. He was struggling. Suddenly, was cut off. It was like, wait. You were my high. Now you're not making me happy all the time. You're not you're you're kind of, like, giving me a hangover. So I was like, well, what do I do? I need my fix. You're you're not you're struggling, but I'm supposed to be you're supposed to be getting high. Like, so I feel like in a way that was my kind of form of addiction playing out. And my worst moments with him were kind of like going cold turkey, like being cut off. And it took me some real processing and effort to figure out, hey. Wait a second. It's not fair to him. I can't let him I can't put that on him. This is this is about me. True. And so and and writing this memoir helps helped a great deal. I really

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[21:37]Zibby Owens: I mean, on top of all of those complicated, delicate relationships, you also have the literary world as a character itself. The rise and fall of different books. Your career, his career, how they dovetail, what it means to succeed and fail and come back and fail and come back again. And I feel like publishing has caused some of the damage represented in the book. Yeah.

[22:02]Joe McGinniss Jr.: I mean, what are you gonna do? I mean, he my father the fact that he wrote Fatal Vision and that was his sort of comeback and had a string of true crime bestsellers after the Blind Faith crueled out, all were on TV, NBC miniseries. I mean, he made a ridiculous amount of money publishing. And through, you know, a couple really bad choices, he was ruined because of the sails falling off a cliff and his behavior. And it it once he saw felt the pressure, like, he he made this monumental choice to write the OJ Simpson book about the OJ Simpson murder trial. He spent a year in the courtroom with Dominic Dunn and and and the Goldman family and got to know them and felt just such empathy for them. And then decided when he got home, I can't write the book. Mhmm. Now granted, he had a $1,700,000 contract to write two books, OJ Simpson and the book of his choosing. This was after Janet Malcolm had written The Journalist and the Murderer and basically took him to task and said, hey, here's the problem with journalism. You can't you know? And then he wrote this Ted Kennedy biography. Of course, he was paid handsomely. It he got crushed for it because he was accused of a lot of things that he did and didn't do. But he still had a chance with the OJ Simpson book and gave that back and wrote a book about Italian soccer. It went off the cliff, and then he could never recover. Mhmm. In in publishing, they said, look, you are we can't deal with you. We can't handle you. So it just was it was he lived it at the highest level. Okay? So he was playing this game at the highest level and managed to burn these bridges and and sort of I mean, sadly, he he was it wasn't so much publishing that took him down. It was kind of his own behavior and his own choices. And so he was able to rise from the ashes before when publishing was when books were bigger, but he kinda ran out of time and ran out of chances because he continued to make tough, bad choices and and sort of he had self control problems. He would send emails to publishers, to his, editors and publicists, but he would CC everybody. And and like this is 40 people would get an email from him raging about the cover of the book or whatever. And so he became like this sort of pariah in publishing, and it was just no one wanted to deal with him.

[24:56]Zibby Owens: And and yet, you decide to go into this as well.

[25:01]Joe McGinniss Jr.: You know, I'm an idiot. But the thing is, I I'm passionate about it. I used to be passionate about politics growing up, so I went all in on that. And then I was in grad school for public policy at age 30, and I'm writing a novel. You know, so I'm convinced, wow, this is coming so easy. Well, I'll just do this for a living. I love this. This is all I wanna do, And it's coming so easy, so this must be an easy path. Like, you just do what you want. Write what you want and then get a deal. Mm-mm. No. It was I was I I was loving writing, but it was terrible at first. You know, I didn't know what I was doing. Seven years later, you know, works out with a lot of lean years because that's the tricky part. Dad was really he was a gambler. So all this money he made, he lost. Mhmm. He lost it in 2002, 2001. He lost millions. He gave it all to these hedge fund guys, these Mhmm. Sketchy the sketchy Markman. You look him up, Google Markman, and he he put all this money in this fund and was kind of doped out from benzos and just let it all go. And he he was so it wasn't like I was sitting there like, oh, man. I got my trust fund. It was like I'm eating tuna from a can. I'm living in this apartment that's like this little tiny studio, and IKEA table that I put together, and I'm just like tapping away asking my girlfriend if she can send me a thousand bucks to pay the rent because my part time job isn't cutting it, and I owe student loan debt. But goddamn, I'm so glad I did it. It was like I've written three books that I'm really proud of. They are the exact books I wanted to write. They're the books I wanna read, and I'm so into my new novel. And I'm just like and I have the most amazing son and the most amazing wife, and I'm just like, I miss my dad terribly, but this is this is I wouldn't want it any other way. And, you know, it it may not read like it and and damage people because you're like, wow. I can't believe some of this stuff actually happened. And, yeah, my half brother is threatening to sue me for defamation, and he sent a letter to the publisher. And I don't know what's gonna happen on October 21 when this publishes. If there's gonna be a lawsuit, my publisher already said don't worry about it. The it's it's it's groundless, but there's a lot of emotion in this thing and a lot of lot of feelings and but it's still a book that I'm proud of and and and wouldn't want any other way.

[27:51]Zibby Owens: That's amazing. Well, just to close, your dad at one point was at a picnic table and a napkin started blowing away. And he was like, it's all blowing away. It's all going away. And you all were like, dad, it's napkin. And then you come back to this line later because, in fact, it kind of was all blowing away, and that was an astute observation of of the things that were slipping through his fingers. How do you put that whole notion to bed? You know,

[28:18]Joe McGinniss Jr.: he he made progress. And something about in doing this memoir, and and it's something that took me three years in in writing this to to learn, and I'm still coming to peace with it. But it may have all been blowing away in the moment for him, and it was there were things he knew he couldn't control. But he found a way to do better than he ever had, and he didn't have anyone teaching him how to do better, to be loving when he needed to be, to step up for us, for his kids when he needed to. In so many ways, he was there, and he was present and made us happy. And that is something that he figured out how to do on his own. And I'd like to think that that is something that I'm doing. I'm I'm I'm moving the ball forward a little bit. So it's not all blowing away. It's just sort of, I don't know, kind of propelling us forward. And it and it's not so bleak and and and uncontrollable, and and it's not just left to chance. We actually have some agency in what we do and how we do it. And it just takes a little bit of reflection and takes a little bit of stepping back and have a little humility and understand, yeah, I'm flawed. We're all damaged people. But, you know, in a way, we're kind of like, that's ordinary. So, you know, this could easily be called ordinary people. But that's taken. You know? We're it's damage is ordinary. And the the key is what you do to move forward a little bit, to do a little bit better, if not a lot better, for your kids. And and that's what my father did. You know? He actually did that in the end. So

[30:08]Zibby Owens: Amazing. Well, I really enjoyed your book and this conversation and the the deep dive into these relationships, which I feel like so many people can get a lot out of when they examine their own relationships with their parents, their kids, how everything is interrelated, things they may regret, but yet how we find more meaning in what we do every day. So, anyway, I really enjoyed it. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Zibby. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank Okay. Take care. Bye. Alright. Bye bye. Thank you for listening to Totally Booked with Zibby, formerly moms don't have time to read books. If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review, follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens, and spread the word. Thanks so much. Oh, and buy the books.