“If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” —Anne Lamott
The letter that arrived in the form of an e-mail was surprising. Maybe it shouldn’t have been. Its tone was semi-formal, as though the author might have prompted ChatGPT: compose a serious letter threatening legal action against a publisher and author if certain demands aren’t met prior to publication of a memoir about a father and his dysfunctional family relations.
The letter was sent to my publisher. The author was my half-brother, Gavin. He lived in the modest house near Northampton, Massachusetts, that my father clung to in his last years. Roger Ailes, a friend of my father’s despite their opposing political and world views, had sent my father checks to prevent its foreclosure in the years leading up to his death. My half-brother was now threatening a defamation suit on behalf of my late father, stepmother, his brother, one of my sisters, and himself, unless some acceptable resolution were reached.
My memoir, Damaged People: A Memoir of Fathers and Sons, would soon publish. My father, Joe McGinniss Sr., also wrote something of a memoir back in 1976. It was called Heroes. This was after he published his first book, The Selling of the President, his best-selling political classic about Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, at 27. He’d toured the world, did The Tonight Show and The Dick Cavett Show, and received full-page letters from Gloria Steinem, Gore Vidal, and so many others. That was when he left my mother, my sisters, and me. Everyone wanted a piece of him. He wrote and drank and partied and recovered and bailed out his bankrupt alcoholic father and wrote some more.
Heroes, in part, detailed his lonely childhood in Rye, New York, the only son of two depressed alcoholics; one, an introverted stamp-collecting architect, and the other, a telephone operator from Queens. Dad spent his adolescence planning his escape from the stifling silence of quiet addiction and the bewildering absences of each parent—his father would disappear for weeks at a time to drink in motels, and his mother was committed to psychiatric hospitals on multiple occasions. He disclosed it all. He wrote about my mother, about cheating on her, leaving her. He wrote about my sisters and the pain they suffered. He spared no one.
My father’s life and behavior generated three memoirs. My stepmother began writing one first, followed by my half-brother. Then I wrote a New Yorker piece about my father called “Lessons from My Father” in the run-up to the publication of my second novel, Carousel Court, in 2016. I spent the next three years writing a third novel, about a young woman on the autism spectrum and her adult siblings after the death of their larger-than-life father. But it was during the coronavirus pandemic and after George Floyd and #MeToo. My editor had concerns about too many elements—the timing, the protagonist, the genre (literary fiction). He asked: Would I consider writing a nonfiction account of my experience with my father, inspired by my New Yorker piece?
My stepmother had put her own memoir aside at that point, though she never said why. My half-brother had kept going. He sent me partial drafts. I worked on mine under contract. He expressed his displeasure, saying it was unfair that I was writing a memoir, too. I reminded him, “We have our own, very different stories to tell.”
All of those stories revolved around the same man, our father, who was at once a confounding amalgam of warmth and humor and mania and fragility and rage. It could be exhausting being our father’s children. For my younger half-siblings, along with the warmth and humor, our father’s self-obsession and addiction played out in front of them daily. That much I was spared. Where my older sister and I grappled with abandonment from birth, my younger half-brother had to cope with fear and confusion and helplessness in the face of a housebound hurricane fueled by gin and wine and prescription pills.
After reading a galley of my memoir, my stepmother wrote me a tersely worded e-mail. We’d barely recovered from a series of e-mails during which she’d tried to dissuade me from writing about Dad, arguing that she stopped writing her own memoir (though that was less about wanting to protect anyone’s feelings and more about her own discouragement with the writing process), that Gavin’s effort was still taking shape, that no one had read Heroes. She’d read my New Yorker piece and sensed what was coming: a broader, deeper unsparing reveal of my father’s dramatic and torturous free fall. She signed off this latest dispatch, “Have a nice life.”
I’m not sure we’ll speak again. I offered to. She e-mailed back: What’s the point? What I do know is I should have said more sooner, earlier, when there was time to help my father. We all have those conversations in our heads, the perfect speech that will sway the sibling or parent to see things the right way, to live differently, to be their best selves. I have mine. I’d delivered it to my father in e-mails and in person. But never just right. Never enough to save him from himself.
Perhaps if all of us, his five children and his wife, had confronted him in the living room of the million-dollar home in Williamstown he was later forced to sell—complete with a small in-ground pool into which he’d once tossed a laptop in frustration, a kitchen he’d destroyed in a drug-induced rage, and a staircase down which he’d been dragged by the local police before his arrest and detention at a nearby psychiatric hospital—we could have convinced him that he had time to live healthier, to put aside some of the millions he’d earned rather than gamble it away on long-shot hedge funds and day-trades. He never copped to alcoholism despite a lifetime of daily drinking to excess. (Though he did admit to a gambling addiction.) He’d never agree to rehab, my stepmother insisted. His mother’s multiple psychiatric hospitalizations traumatized him when he was a child. How I wish we could have helped him. And, in turn, helped all of us.
In the end, the author of the true-crime classic Fatal Vision and multiple other best-sellers couldn’t sell his last book and was broke. He’d canceled his life insurance years prior to save money, to avoid foreclosure. He was an alcoholic who never stopped drinking. In 2014, after ignoring an alarmingly elevated P.S.A. for a year, he died from prostate cancer at the age of 71.
In his wake, I’ve tried to find a version of his story that would bring me enough peace to be better for myself, my spouse, and my children—something he tried to do over the course of his life, however imperfectly, and despite a preponderance of evidence to the contrary. He was warm where his father was cold. He was joyous and generous where his parents were sullen and broke. He was vulnerable and kind and brilliant and tenacious and wildly successful in a brutal industry where success is the rare exception. He was a better father to his five children than his father was to him. That was progress.
It required my writing this memoir to figure that out. That’s my truth in this version of the story of him and me and my family. It’s the one that gives me hope, so I run with it. With gratitude, as well, for in-house counsel.
Joe McGinniss Jr. is an American novelist
