Damaged People - by Joe McGinniss (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Joe McGinniss was a paradox: a brilliant writer whose dazzling achievements were overshadowed by personal demons. At age twenty-six, he became the youngest living person to top the New York Times bestseller list, for his book The Selling of the President about Richard Nixon's 1968 campaign. Shortly after, he walked out on his wife and their three young children.

His oldest son, Joe McGinniss Jr., went on to become a writer himself, known for his critically acclaimed novels The Delivery Man and Carousel Court. In the memoir Damaged People, McGinniss Jr. vividly recounts his affectionate yet stormy relationship with his famous father, capturing moments of tenderness and humor amid the chaos and tension.

The prosaic commitments of full-time fatherhood held little appeal for Joe McGinniss, a superstar author who proudly relished the freedom to chase stories anywhere his curiosity led. He rose to prominence with a trilogy of true crime blockbusters in the 1980s and early '90s, Fatal Vision, Blind Faith, and Cruel Doubt. Notoriously, he found himself the subject of Janet Malcom's The Journalist and the Murderer, a book accusing him of manipulating one of his subjects. Controversy would dog the rest of his journalistic career, as he was accused of falsifying details in his 1993 biography of Ted Kennedy and his 2011 biography of Sarah Palin. His life was a turbulent mix of success and scandal, marked by alcoholism, depression, and an obsessive dedication to his craft that often left his family struggling to stay afloat.

Now a father raising a son of his own, McGinniss Jr. wrestles with the legacy of his upbringing and his father's self-destruction, striving to create a stable and nurturing environment for his child. The pressures of modern parenting--ranging from competitive school admissions to the mental health challenges that today's youth face--force him to confront long-buried demons of ambition and obsession. Damaged People dives deep into the heartbreak of unfulfilled expectations and the beauty of second chances, offering an unflinching look at what it means to grow into a more compassionate and present parent.

Bringing a novelist's storytelling skills to this deeply personal story, McGinniss Jr. delivers a poignant tale of grace, resilience, and growth, showing us that even in the face of fractured relationships, there's hope for healing and a brighter future.

Review Quotes

"A fearless novel about a family and a society on the brink . . . Harrowing but, against all odds, ultimately tender . . . [Nick and Phoebe] offer the possibility of a simple but enormous grace: that we may fail and still be loved, if only imperfectly, if only for a time."
--O, The Oprah Magazine

"Carousel Court is a gritty, raw novel that will have readers recalling the icy relationships found in Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl and Adam Ross's Mr. Peanut. McGinniss's work is built on layers of tension and dark turns that, at times, surpass the twisted works of his contemporaries. . . . McGinniss deserves a lot of credit for handling the darkness so well. He never seems to overdo it. When he gets close to the edge, he adds in just the right amount of humor."
--Electric Literature

"A novel of unrelenting tension . . . Phoebe is a lexicon of contradictions, a kind of update on Maria Wyeth of Joan Didion's Play It as It Lays. McGinniss also recalls Nathanael West's Day of the Locust in depicting their road, Carousel Court, as a catalog of strangeness and dangers: from coyotes and marauding home invaders to weird neighbors and crying, screaming cicadas. McGinniss . . . injects it with an urgency, a sense of constant, inescapable threat that all adds up to a taut page-turner."
--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Amazing . . . Raucously inventive . . . McGinniss's gorgeous prose captures the agony of the 'moaning winds and anguished cries coming from the bone-dry hills' as well as the rare beauty of a day when 'everything pops: the colors, the people, the thick, warm aroma of coffee, the bright sunlight.' But he's also a master at character, juxtaposing shallow Millennials with Phoebe and Nick, pointing out how the younger generation has 'a margin for error' that Phoebe and Nick simply can't afford at their stage in life."
--San Francisco Chronicle

"Fast . . . Foreboding . . . This couple will stop at nothing to keep their house and marriage afloat. . . . McGinniss spins an edgy tale, often laced with a reporter's eye for the little details that make characters pop and convey a sarcastic take on what a certain slice of people need nowadays to feel uplifted: anti-anxiety pills, yes, but also the produce section of Whole Foods, where Phoebe has spent so much time that she's learned 'the fine mist showering the mustard greens, arugula, and summer squash is on a forty-second cycle--ten seconds on, thirty seconds off.'"
--The Washington Post

"Gripping . . . A portrait of a marriage as volatile as the economy."
--The Millions

"Harrowing, smart, wickedly accurate about the third world of the contemporary United States, and very well written."
--Lionel Shriver, author of We Need to Talk about Kevin

"Here it is, the leveraged, frayed, unfaithful, buzzed America that all the baloney entertainment products, including a lot that pose as literature, are designed to cover up. Can you handle the truth? Then step inside. This scathing novel of our strange new century is like nothing else I've read in years."
--Walter Kirn, author of Up in the Air

"McGinniss is poised to become one of our sharpest observers of life in America at the start of the 21st century. . . . Watching things get ugly for Nick and Phoebe is riveting. . . . What makes the reader turn the pages of Carousel Court isn't the tragedy that befalls Nick and Phoebe--it's the threat of tragedy. The couple and their toddler are skating on the edge of a razor blade and the reader is hooked by their struggle to put their lives back together."
--Kirkus Reviews

"McGinniss writes with a keen feel for the contemporary zeitgeist. . . . His characters in Carousel Court move in a brutal world of broken personal connections, social unrest, and financial desperation. . . . Yet McGinniss opens a window of hope as Nick and Phoebe survive the mess they make of their lives."
--Shelf Awareness (starred review)

"Powerful . . . May have some readers recalling Yeats' poem 'The Second Coming.' "
--Booklist (starred review)

"Propulsive . . . Carousel Court is a raw, close-up portrait of a married couple tormented by money problems in the midst of a national recession. . . . The result is thrilling and uncomfortable--a novel that dwells in the filth of love and hate and blame and money in post-crash America with an intimacy that never lets up. . . . The marriage starts to feel not just tense but enormously dangerous. . . . It's very hard to look away."
--Los Angeles Times

"Propulsive . . . The novel's nearly 100 vignettes--many of them gems of concision and electric prose that lay bare the darker sides of Nick and Phoebe, as well as the handful of coworkers and eccentric neighbors who swirl down the drain with them--mirror the discontent seething just beneath the surface of an ersatz American dream. . . . McGinniss is at his best when describing, with anthropological intensity, the throes of a broken relationship."
--Publishers Weekly

"Totally addictive."
--Bookish

About the Author