Damaged People is a story about a son and his father, and another story about a father and his son; both stories full of love and recrimination. This book cries out with tenderness and nostalgia. Deeply felt and deeply moving. Lili Anolik, author of Didion & Babitz Joe McGinniss Jr.s Damaged People is a major work in a minor key. Beautiful, haunting, heartbreaking, funny, evoking the universal in the particular story of two writers, father and son. Sr. is famous, distant, utterly self-absorbed. Jr. is honest, anxious, searching for something he fears is beyond his reach. I loved this book. David Maraniss, author of A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father Every son is torn, perhaps, between a fear of turning out like his father and a fear of failing to live up to him. Joe McGinniss Jr.s tender, searching, beautifully self-interrogative Damaged People threads the eye of both questions with remarkable intelligence and sensitivity. The result is book that is at once powerfully moving and utterly riveting, a lovely document of what it means to be a child, a spouse, and a parent. Matthew Specktor, author of The Golden Hour: A Story of Family and Power in Hollywood Moving between the 1970s and 80s, when the author was a young boy anxious for his fathers attention, and the 2000s, when hes grappling with being a father to a young son, McGinniss Jr. draws comparisons between who he was becoming and who McGinniss Sr. was as a writer and father. . . . His determination to break generational patterns resonates. Kirkus Reviews Praise for Carousel Court:
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 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 uncomfortablea 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. . . . Its very hard to look away. Los Angeles Times Fast . . . Foreboding . . . This couple will stop at nothing to keep their house and marriage afloat. . . . McGinniss spins an edgy tale, often laced with a reporters 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 shes learned the fine mist showering the mustard greens, arugula, and summer squash is on a forty-second cycleten seconds on, thirty seconds off. The Washington Post Amazing . . . Raucously inventive . . . McGinnisss 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 hes 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 cant afford at their stage in life. San Francisco Chronicle 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 isnt the tragedy that befalls Nick and Phoebeits 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 Carousel Court is a gritty, raw novel that will have readers recalling the icy relationships found in Gillian Flynns Gone Girl and Adam Rosss Mr. Peanut. McGinnisss 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
