Our Fathers’ Affairs

We met by accident. I mean that literally—a Yankee friend of mine blew a tire while driving south and swerved into oncoming traffic. He came out of it untouched, and wound up in Atlanta while his car was being serviced. I live in Atlanta, and he called to see if I wanted to go out to dinner with him and his Aunt Maura to celebrate his survival.

Maura was around my age and fairly new to town. We talked for a few minutes before dinner and she asked what I’d been writing. I told her I’d just finished a book about my father, Lou Junod. “What’s so interesting about him?” she asked, and I gave what had become my standard answer: “He was a philanderer.” And then, because that word didn’t seem to do Big Lou justice, I added the usual modifiers: charismatic, reckless, ruthless, relentless, irresistible, unrepentant, prolific.

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Maura’s reply did not require as many words. Her father also happened to be a philanderer, she said. But he wasn’t like that—he didn’t play the field. He was, by all appearances, an upright man. He just had a woman across town, and with her he had a second family, who knew him better than Maura’s family ever did, because at least the children the world deemed illegitimate knew his secrets. “It haunts me,” she said. “It haunts me, and it haunts my choices.”

And then she asked the question that changed how I think about my father and men like him, perhaps men in general:

“How many of us do you think are out there?”

It was the us that threw me. I’d known almost all my life that my father was different from other fathers, both the comical ones I met in my neighborhood and the wise ones I watched on TV. When I was 3 years old, he had an affair with the mother of my first friend. When I was 6 or 7, he asked—he made a big deal of asking—if I wanted to go out for a hot-fudge sundae, and then stopped at a woman’s house on the way to the ice-cream parlor and left me outside on the swings. When I was in college, he invited me to New York City for a night on the town, and introduced me to one of his girlfriends. I was close with my brother, my sister, and my mother, but I never told them what I knew. I never told anyone.

I was ashamed, of course—ashamed of him, ashamed of myself. But I was also proud. I had to be, because that’s what he demanded, that was our margin of survival. He made my mother cry. He made me cry too. But that wasn’t his fault; it was ours. It was, especially, mine. He didn’t do what he did because he was broken or weak or simply bad; he did it because he was special, a traveling salesman who, by virtue of his looks, his tan, and his insistence on his own virility, became a kind of bedroom celebrity, even to actual celebrities like the Gabor sisters. He did what other men wanted to do, what all men would do, if only they could, if only they weren’t so … weak. Did I want to be weak? No, anything but that. And so I made a faith of his faithlessness, believing that it, like Lou Junod himself, was unique.

[From the April 2019 issue: Sarah Zhang on the fertility doctor’s secret]

I knew what he did when he went on business trips for five or six weeks at a time or stayed overnight in Manhattan. But it took me a long time to find a language for what and who he was. He kept Playboy magazines in the drawer of his nightstand. Is that what he was, a playboy? Well, maybe, except that playboys weren’t supposed to be married to my mother. Was he a swinger? Nah—because he wasn’t countercultural, and he was above growing out his sideburns and wearing Nehru jackets. How about the words I encountered when I went to college and read Dostoyevsky, words such as sensualist and libertine ? That was more like it, because at least those words were classy, unlike the more readily available, the more down-and-dirty adulterer and cheat.

I forget when I first came across philanderer. I remember that it struck me right away as a euphemism, a kind of excuse. Though rooted in Greek, it seemed French in intent, a description of a man with a pastime instead of a problem. It is a victimless crime of a word. Like multitudes of men and women throughout history, Lou Junod was promiscuous, lavishly and energetically so. But as a philanderer in good standing with the Oxford English Dictionary, he acquires a certain distinction—a set of linguistic cuff links for his custom-made shirts—that sets him apart and gives him what he was so skilled at making: a pass.

Society has adopted philanderer as its word of choice for men like my father. But I did not write about him as such; I was careful to write about him as Dad rather than as a type. I doubt he’d appreciate having his secrets remorselessly exposed by his son in the pages of a book, but I believe he would give me credit for abiding by the terms of the silent pact we made so long ago. He would never be anything less than one of a kind. He would never be less than Big Lou. And so I was shocked when I met my friend’s Aunt Maura and with one question she turned the whole proposition upside down.

“How many of us …”

And there it was, the most impossible word for the child of a philanderer, the us that tells you you’re not alone. Don’t get me wrong—I liked the idea of having something in common with other people. I even liked the idea of being, well, a people, something larger than myself or even my family, a betrayed class, an entire woeful demographic. The only difficulty was that in seeing myself as part of an us, I had to see my father as part of a them, and I had invested so much of myself and my writing in the premise of his singularity. He was grubby and unglamorous as part of a group. He was typical—oh, let’s just say it, he was a typical male. He was not just unfaithful, he was not just promiscuous, he was not just an adulterer, he was not just a cheater, he was not just a philanderer—or, rather, he was just those things, and nothing more.

He was run-of-the-mill.

[From the December 2019 issue: Tom Junod on his friend Mister Rogers]

And yet the question that Maura asked was not an idle one, not just a thought exercise. It has an answer, and I’ve been reminded of it nearly every day since publishing my book.

I see them at the end of the signing line in bookstores, waiting patiently not just for an inscribed copy, but for the chance to speak the words that for most of their lives have been stalled at the tip of their tongue. I hear from them by email or direct message, the high-school classmates who write that they never knew I was just like them; the children of my father’s friends who tell me that I’ve told their stories as well as my own. And I meet them at parties, the acquaintances who become friends when they tell me about the news they received when they took their Ancestry.com tests; when they heard from the siblings they’d never known; when they found out about their father’s second or third family, or when they discovered that they were members of the second or third family and not, as they’d thought all their lives, the first and the only.

How many of us are out there? I can say with great confidence that the answer is a lot, because I’ve gone out at last to meet the us, and it’s been the great belated gift of my growing-up to be able to speak with them, to be able to speak for them, and to know that what they want to tell me is often exactly what I want to tell them:

I loved him.

We are a wised-up lot, you see. We spent our innocence trying to believe in men we knew were guilty, only to find ourselves sometimes being employed as accessories and even collaborators in their crimes. But we always had one thing we could count on because we didn’t find it in our fathers’ closets, drawers, coat pockets, briefcases, or post-office boxes but rather in ourselves: our helpless love for the men who couldn’t stop breaking our hearts. And so when I’m out among them, my people, I hear myself saying it, and they hear themselves saying it, and we know it’s only a matter of time before we move on to the question we can’t answer:

Did he ... ?

And there’s something I hear myself saying often in response to this, in addition to my hopeful Yes. He was a good father, I say. He tried hard. He spent time with me. He always showed me affection. He never stinted on telling me he loved me. He was dedicated, he was dogged, he was determined.

And that’s when I see that I’m at last surrounded by people who are not so different from me, who are just the same, and who know that everything I’m saying about Lou Junod as a father, I could be saying about Big Lou the philanderer.

*Image sources: CSA-Printstock / Getty; GraphicaArtis / Getty; LMPC / Getty; Found Image Holdings / Corbis Historical / Getty; Jack Mitchell / Getty.

This article appears in the November 2026 print edition with the headline “Our Fathers’ Affairs.”

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