SwatTalk: Joe McGinniss Jr. ’94 and Sam Sussman ’13

“Writing About Parents and Sons” with Joe McGinniss Jr. ’94 and Sam Sussman ’13

The relationship between parents and sons is a rich vein in literature and history — one that two Swarthmore alums, Joe McGinniss Jr. ’94 and Sam Sussman ’13, have recently mined to great effect.

In Damaged People: A Memoir of Fathers and Sons, McGinniss Jr. tells the story of his affectionate yet stormy relationship with his father, the celebrated political and true crime writer Joe McGinniss. Recounting his father’s tumultuous career while also tracing his own, McGinnis Jr., a critically acclaimed novelist, acknowledges the literary debts he owes his father but lays bare his desire to forge a different path as a father himself. Hailed by David Sheff as “brave, sometimes painful, and always engrossing,” Damaged People is a testament to the heartbreak of unfulfilled expectations and the beauty of second chances.

Sussman’s novel Boy from the North Country was praised by Kirkus as “the most beautiful and moving mother-son story in recent memory” and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in Fiction. An ambitious exercise in autofiction, drawn from Sussman’s Harper’s memoir essay “The Silent Type: On (Possibly) Being Bob Dylan’s Son,” Boy from the North Country tells the story of Evan, a midtwenties writer, who returns home to upstate New York from his life abroad after his mother is diagnosed with cancer. Evan has never known the identity of his biological father, or the elusive story of his mother’s long-ago romance with Bob Dylan. Caring for his mother as her illness worsens, and as she begins to tell him truths he has waited so long to hear, Evan comes to understand the startling gift this extraordinary woman has bequeathed him.

Please join McGinniss and Sussman for a conversation with novelist and Swarthmore College Visiting Assistant Professor of English Literature Moriel Rothman-Zecher about their work.