S1 E48 Unraveling Tom J Tom Junod has spent much of his career investigating other people’s lives. His profile of Fred Rogers inspired the film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, and his essay The Falling Man became one of the most recognized pieces of writing about 9/11. But in his memoir, In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man, Tom turns that investigative lens on his own family.
Tom grew up loving and fearing his father, Big Lou: a charismatic, stylish, larger-than-life man who treated masculinity as something to be performed. From a young age, Tom sensed that things in his family were not quite what they seemed. When he finally began investigating his father’s past, one revelation led to another: hidden relationships, misattributed parentage, unknown relatives, and a family history that looked nothing like the one he had inherited.
SHOW NOTES
In this conversation, Kara and Tom discuss:
- Loving and fearing a larger-than-life father—and struggling with whether to become like him or reject his example
- How Big Lou’s ideas about sex, appearance, and masculinity shaped Tom’s childhood
- Finding a path toward his own identity through writing
- Watching the family history he had always accepted as fact unravel one discovery at a time
- What DNA revealed about misattributed parentage across multiple generations
- His father’s refusal to acknowledge an unknown sister—and Tom’s determination to find his own
- Recognizing something familiar in his half-sister Lizzie before DNA confirmed the connection
- Navigating gatekeeping, uncertainty, and the decision to make contact
- Why a difficult truth can sometimes bring relief
- Bringing Big Lou’s descendants together at a family reunion
- How uncovering the truth can become an act of assembly rather than destruction
Tom’s story is about fathers and sons, inherited definitions of manhood, and the secrets that shape families long after the people who created them are gone. It is also about what can happen when someone refuses to leave the truth buried—and discovers that unraveling an old family story can create space to build something more honest, connected, and whole.
Everyone has the right to know the truth about where they come from. Unraveling Me speaks to those people impacted by DNA surprises, NPEs (non-paternal event), adoption, assisted reproduction, and other revelations that their parentage isn't entirely what they thought. Having experienced an NPE herself, Kara (through Right To Know and this podcast) seeks to highlight those moments when we learn the most unsettling of secret—who we really are.
At Right To Know, we encourage engagement to facilitate and create real change. As an organization, we are inclusive. We assist adoptees, the donor-conceived community, people with an NPE, birth parents, gamete providers, new genetic family, recipient parents, raising families, and significant others. In learning and growing from each other, we must put the voices of adoptees, donor conceived, and people with an NPE first.
For more information about Right To Know - or if you have a story you want to tell - please visit us at https://righttoknow.us/.
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