How The Damaged Live

How The Damaged Live

By David Breithaupt

Damaged People by Joe McGinniss Jr

Avid Reader Press Oct 21st 2025

“Even nightingales can’t live on songs alone.”

--- Turgenev

Fathers and Sons

Like the fabled Icarus, Joe McGinniss Sr. flew a little too close to the sun, singed a few wing feathers and faltered in an eventual crash-landing with

significant collateral damage. His best-selling book, The Selling of the President (1969) described as classic political journalism, elevated him

to sonic celebrity at a young age with an influx of cash. McGinniss Sr. rode with Nixon in the 1968 presidential

campaign and detailed his experiences in the book in an intimate and familiar way. Fame brought more sirens than the

Odyssey, creating stress fractures within his family. Joe Sr left shortly after the author was born and moving forward

was a slow and cumbersome task. His father drank and gambled, suffering setbacks such as when Janet Malcom attacked the

integrity of his true-crime book, Fatal Vision (1983), in her own book, The Journalist and the Murderer (1990). He then suffered a lawsuit from

Jeffrey MacDonald, the subject of his book, Fatal Vision, for misrepresentation and then demanded a share of the book’s profits.

Joe Sr. continued writing while beginning a slow erosion from the pace of his vices. Money ran low and psychiatric

problems arose. After two suicide attempts and an arrest in Italy, Joe Sr. ran out of words.

The challenge for Joe McGinniss Jr. was side-stepping the pitfalls of his father in raising his son. Though he never

drank, moments of anger plagued him as it did with his father. Echoes of his upbringing were always present.

Damaged People is a vibrant and captivating exploration of how we live and

what makes us continue, showing how a family loves as well as how it fails.

Joe McGinniss Jr is the author of two acclaimed novels, The Delivery Man (2008), a NY Times Book Review “Editor’s Choice”

and Carousel Court (2016).

I corresponded recently with Joe McGinniss Jr. via email about family, the future of journalism and how to carry on.

Breithaupt; The title of your memoir struck me as a bit of a spoiler alert but what might a

reader encounter who fears pages of familial mayhem?

McGinniss Jr; Aren’t we all damaged people? Seems a matter of degree. We’re imperfect

beings and some of it is inherited, self-inflicted, chance, bad fortune. What does it do to us?

What do we learn from it about ourselves and the world? Do we do the necessary

introspection to move forward, improve in the wake of it? If not for ourselves, then

especially for those closest to us. And most especially for children, should we have any.

Damaged People could just as easily have been called Ordinary People. And memoirs about

family that don’t involve or explore some amount of mayhem seem like missed opportunities.

Most read to inhabit other worlds and take journeys with people they wouldn’t otherwise

know and be entertained and challenged and ultimately to feel something, many things. And

if they walk away merely feeling better about their own lot in life, that seems worth the $29.

DB; Comparing out, I think it’s called in 12 Step lingo. I wonder what kind of person I

would have been, growing up in circumstances such as yours. You certainly used the

grid of your own youth in raising your son to avoid the mistakes of your

father. How successful do you think you were and how difficult was it?

JM; Even accounting for the era, he and my mother started so young, too young.

Married at twenty-two/three and three children while still in their twenties. My wife and I

had our first and only son in our mid-thirties, after years spent married and working and

living in California and experiencing life alone and together and with a dog and then

finally, when we felt we were ready, a child, the best thing that happened in either of our

lives.

I was spooked by what my father did, leaving us behind, and it took me longer

than it should have to commit to marriage and then parenting. Unsurprisingly, the easy

part for me was the honeymoon period of both the marriage and parenthood. The

contract for my first novel was signed months before my son was born. The timing was

impeccable and insanely fortunate. My wife labeled it our golden age. And it truly was.

My father’s first book, The Selling of The President, published in 1969, after the birth of

his second daughter became a runaway bestseller, and he was traveling the country and

world promoting and celebrating it and himself. He was a 20-something famous author

and everyone wanted a piece of him – including young women. He was a literary rock

star with two daughters and a wife at home wondering when he’d be back and if he’d

stay. And then he left again and didn’t return. Then I was born. I can’t imagine being as

famous as he was, that young, with a family at home depending on me to be present

and engaged. Clearly, it wasn’t something he felt capable of doing.

The pain he caused me, the original emotional fracture from his leaving and not

being present in my daily life, was formative. I oozed empathy and earnestness and

sensitivity. The result, over so many years of growing up with a nurturing, present yet

overwhelmed working single mother of three, was an instinct to attach and hang on

because otherwise, as my father showed me, you might lose it if you don’t.

The toughest part for my son was that I’d never evolved as a parent in the way

he needed when things got tough, as they do for all teenagers. I was still the

honeymoon phase dad who needed to adjust, meet him where he was, not follow

impulses and instincts that weren’t healthy for him. Example: he struggled with

something he loved, basketball. He needed me to be more mature, understanding,

wise-minded, i.e., a decent parent putting his child’s emotional needs first. What had

come so easy for me, almost like a high, for the first twelve years of his life was

suddenly a monumental challenge. This boy, the light of my life, was suddenly listing,

struggling and I was the addict who was reeling because where was the high? He was

the high and his struggle was keeping it from me. And there’s not much uglier than the

addict seeking a fix. So even though I never drank, took a hit of weed, for a time I was

very much possessed by what I imagine an addict must feel when they’re cut off.

Something my father never was, by the way. Drank, mostly to excess, daily his entire

adult life.

DB; Your father received some aftershocks when Janet Malcom released her book, The

Journalist and the Murderer, disputing the integrity of his journalism in his book, Fatal Vision. Do

you see that event as a milepost in how trust in journalism began to erode?

JM; He sure did. He’d been approached by Green Beret surgeon Jeffrey

MacDonald after Joseph Wambaugh turned him down. He wanted someone to write his

side of the story -- the unjustly persecuted golden boy who survived a murderous

rampage that claimed the lives of his pregnant wife and two little girls -- all savagely

bludgeoned and stabbed to death with ice picks and knives. Somehow, in the face of

four attackers, Jeffrey suffered only carefully incised stab wounds -- almost as if a

surgeon had administered them.

So he wanted a writer to make him look good. There was a career to be had after an

acquittal and a big book would help launch it, whatever form it might take. Maybe just a life

of surgery and parties on the cabin cruiser speedboat he purchased after

the slaughter of his family upon moving to Huntington Beach, California.

My father made it clear to him -- yes, we can enter into a profit-sharing agreement by

which MacDonald receives a portion of book sale proceeds in exchange for complete

access to the subject and his defense team and all of their deliberations, both formal and

informal. There was no promise made about findings and both agreed the story would be

written as my father uncovered it.

Janet Malcolm came along in the wake of her own public trial for misleading and

deceiving a subject -- Jeffrey Masson -- in search of some sort of redemption. Similar to

my father, who MacDonald sued in 1987, Malcolm sought a story and a name that

would elevate, if not, redeem her in journalistic circles. My father sent letters to twenty

or so journalists to tell his side of the MacDonald lawsuit story (he should have left well

enough alone) and only Janet Malcolm responded.

She never intended to write anything other than a scathing, ridiculous indictment

of my father -- an outsider in journalistic and writing world -- not a Manhattan cocktail

circuit suck-up like Malcolm and her New Yorker friends. So he was an easy target. He

was also famous and wildly successful with The Selling of the President and Fatal

Vision both monumental successes. She knew his name at that time would elevate her

as well.

My father wrote the following in an addendum to Fatal Vison called Final Vision:

“To me, the problem of the reporter and the subject seems analogous to that posed by

Heisenberg in his formulation of the ‘uncertainty principle,’ which states that any attempt

to measure precisely the velocity of a subatomic particle will knock it about in an

unpredictable way, thereby altering the very force that the experimenter has sought to

quantify. The reporter, by his very presence, causes a change in the behavior of the

person about whom he eventually hopes to write. His goal should be to minimize this

alteration.”

As David Ulin summed up in an LA Times piece after my father died: ”He’s right,

of course, about both the effect and the uncertainty, but what he’s really offering is a

code not just for journalists but for every writer: to have no greater loyalty than to the

story itself.” He sure did. He’d been approached by Green Beret surgeon Jeffrey

MacDonald after Joseph Wambaugh turned him down. He wanted someone to write his

side of the story -- the unjustly persecuted golden boy who survived a murderous

rampage that claimed the lives of his pregnant wife and two little girls -- all savagely

bludgeoned and stabbed to death with ice picks and knives. Somehow, in the face of

four attackers, Jeffrey suffered only carefully incised stab wounds -- almost as if a

surgeon had administered them.

DB; I grew up in the Nixon years and clearly recall him leading the charge against the

press. How far do you think trust in journalism has fallen since then with social media and AI?

JM; It does seem that the Internet and social media make it far easier for people

to do and quote their own research and not; and find and quote their own facts and quotes. Many of those were the people

who used to snatch the Weekly World News and National Enquirer from grocery store

check-out lines. Now all of that and so much more is in everyone’s hand, 24/7. So the

conspiracy-minded are overfed and the rest of us at best titillated and at worst

persuaded by the brightest, shiniest objects in the ether, on our phones. Then there are

others who fully understand the access game played by journalists and the degree to

which compromises the integrity of their work. Think Politico and Axios and certain

political reporters and the political hacks whose careers depend on clicks and whose

clicks depend on access. If they piss off the powerful with too many tough questions,

they don’t get the quotes, someone else does and they won’t be able to sell a book or

snatch a coveted talking-head contract on cable news. It’s unseemly at best. And now

they’re competing with the smartphone for our attention. How in the world can they? So

just how much can I trust Maggie Haberman when she reports about Donald Trump and

his duplicity when I later learn that she sat on relevant information prior to the election

because she was saving it for her multi-million-dollar book? She’s not alone. They all do

it. And it compromises trust in the integrity of what is most often pretty fantastic work.

As far as AI....we are so fcked.

DB; You just made me realize or rather reminded me, that I don’t trust Haberman. Bob Woodward was

accused of doing the same, sitting on info. I suddenly wonder how much I trust journalism now. Do you

see a remedy for restoring trust or have we gone too far around the bend?

JM; I hope so. AI scares me. I don’t trust the corporate interests that control media, and

therefore journalism, to ever do anything other than maximize profits. Do individuals exist who

care about doing real reporting and breaking important stories? Absolutely. I’m cynical and

loathe the shallow corporate media/wannabe celebrity ethic that’s taken hold but still pick up

The New York Times and read the stories and accept that most, if not all, of each piece is

truthful. Are there Judith Miller’s and Bob Woodward’s (late version) and Maggie Haberman’s

who sit on information or twist it to serve personal interests? Of course. But even Haberman,

despite her origin-story (the friggin’ New York Post was her first so-called journalism job) does

amazing reporting on a regular basis. Nothing is sacred. Take nothing for granted. I never would

have believed the Washington Post and LA Times could fall so far, so fast. They can and likely

will be salvaged someday, like the White House rose garden.

DB; While reading your memoir, I was impressed by your balance, despite some of the carnage

left by your father, of your persisting affection for him. Is there a takeaway you would like your

readers to have from reading your book?

JM; First of all, thank you for reading it at all. And for such thoughtful questions.

The persisting affection for my father came easy because he was such a loving

soul, which made it all the more painful to witness and contend with his struggles. I don't really

wish he was an asshole but it sure would have made it easier to move on.

Takeaways? Maybe to speak your mind and be true to yourself. Tell the people

closest to you how you feel and why you feel that way. Have the difficult conversations after

you've asked if they're up to it. Write them first (which gives them time to process and respond) and then see

if you can't speak or see each other and talk face to face. Ideally, even if you don't fine peace with one another,

you may be more at peace with yourself and your feelings about the other because you cared enough to try.