Joe McGinniss was a bestselling author and, in his son's telling, an absent father. Joe McGinniss Jr. looks back at that relationship while bringing up his own boy.

Readical Key Points

• A memoir by the novelist Joe McGinniss Jr., son of the author of The Selling of the President and Fatal Vision
• Moves between the author's boyhood in the 1970s and '80s and his own years as a father
• Content note: addresses a parent's alcoholism and depression and a family's breakdown
• Reviewed in Kirkus Reviews and Booklist
• Hardcover, 288 pages, Avid Reader Press, 2025

McGinniss Jr. recounts growing up as the oldest son of a writer who topped the bestseller list at twenty-six and left the family soon after. In the son's account, his father chased stories wherever they led and struggled with alcohol and depression, and there were also moments of affection and humor. Alongside that story runs the author's own fatherhood, as the pressures of raising a child today force him to confront his own ambition and obsession.

Readers of family memoir, and of the true crime and political books that made the elder McGinniss famous, will find the other side of that byline here. Every portrait of the father is the son's. The father made his name telling other people's stories. The son tells the one closest to home.

About the Author

Joe McGinniss Jr. is the author of the novels Carousel Court and The Delivery Man.

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