In the 1970s and ’80s, a time when prominent print journalists still could achieve wealth and celebrity status, Joe McGinniss stood at the pinnacle of his profession. Before reaching his 27th birthday, his book, THE SELLING OF THE PRESIDENT 1968 --- the story of the successful effort masterminded by young TV producer Roger Ailes to repackage and market Richard Nixon in his second presidential run --- became a massive bestseller and remains an essential political campaign handbook to this day. His true-crime book, FATAL VISION --- the account of US Army Special Forces Green Beret Jeffrey MacDonald’s savage murder of his wife and two young daughters --- spawned an NBC miniseries, the first episode of which was viewed by 60 million Americans.

But there was a dark side to this gleaming picture of professional achievement. That’s the story that Joe McGinniss Jr. painfully but eloquently recounts in DAMAGED PEOPLE. In his disturbing, often heartbreaking, memoir, Joe Jr. twins his candid postmortem of the wreckage of his father’s life with an account of his own struggles to parent his son Jayson, a bright, sensitive only child, devoted to the game of basketball with aspirations of someday playing professionally.

"DAMAGED PEOPLE is an almost relentlessly bleak book, but what redeems it from voyeurism and makes it well worth reading is Joe Jr.’s candor and graceful writing that would elicit his father’s pride even as he undoubtedly would cringe at some of the harrowing scenes portrayed here."

Joe Jr. ignored his father’s career advice and, after graduating from Swarthmore College, eventually found his way into the family business, producing two novels to date. His memoir, which shifts frequently between its two narratives, takes its title from the words of Pulitzer Prize-winning author J. Anthony Lukas, Joe Sr.’s close friend, who took his own life in 1997: “All writers are, to one extent or another, damaged people. Writing is our way of repairing ourselves.”

In Joe Sr.’s case, much of the damage stemmed from a childhood of “cold, quiet dysfunction” in Rye, New York, in the household of a depressed, alcoholic mother frequently hospitalized for her illness, and an emotionally absent father. As an adult, work became Joe Sr.’s refuge, to the exclusion of any true concern for the well-being of his wife or children. “Writing came first for him,” Joe Jr. writes, “always and ahead of everything --- family, money, and stability.” After fathering two girls, and when his wife was pregnant with Joe Jr., he abandoned the family home in suburban Philadelphia to move in with his girlfriend, Nina, in New Jersey, later relocating to Williamstown, Massachusetts, and marrying her.

After his initial run of professional success, an embarrassing lawsuit by Jeffrey MacDonald and a brutal dissection of his journalistic ethics by Janet Malcolm in The New Yorker and a later book launched McGinniss’ career on a downward spiral at a time when it should have been flourishing. His decision to forfeit the $1.7 million advance he received to write a book about the O.J. Simpson trial when he decided he had “nothing to say” about the notorious case was the final blow. By the time of his death from prostate cancer in 2014, his sustained lack of productivity, and a run of disastrous stock trading amid the unraveling of the tech bubble, he had squandered the multimillion-dollar net worth his writing had generated and faced imminent eviction from his Massachusetts home. 

But the true darkness in Joe Sr.’s life involved his alcoholism and decades-long abuse of highly addictive prescription drugs he consumed to deal with his depression and its related effects. The catalog of those medications is staggering. In 2001, when he had fled his second wife and the two troubled sons of that union for a teaching job in Italy, he made multiple suicide attempts, eventually landing briefly in a psychiatric hospital in Massachusetts after Nina flew to Rome to retrieve him. 

Though he’s had his own encounters with depression, Joe Jr. has been fortunate to escape the McGinniss family history of substance abuse. Paradoxically, it seems, the legacy of his father’s indifference manifested in his case in an intrusive, demanding parenting style, particularly when it came to micromanaging Jayson’s basketball career. When faced with the choice between offering encouragement and support, or berating Jayson at moments when he fell short of the high standards his father set for him, Joe Jr. inevitably chose the latter. It’s painful to watch his vivid recreations of some of their most difficult encounters, but it’s ultimately reassuring to watch the evolution of their relationship over time. 

Whether he’s describing his father’s shortcomings or assessing his own failings as a parent, Joe Jr. is unsparing. DAMAGED PEOPLE is an almost relentlessly bleak book, but what redeems it from voyeurism and makes it well worth reading is Joe Jr.’s candor and graceful writing that would elicit his father’s pride even as he undoubtedly would cringe at some of the harrowing scenes portrayed here. It wouldn’t be accurate to describe this memoir as a cautionary tale, because the seeds of Joe McGinniss’ downfall were, to a significant extent, rooted in his DNA and in the particulars of the environment in which he was raised. But it’s at least a reminder to think twice before envying anyone’s professional achievements without knowing the price exacted to attain them.