Memoirs by the children of celebrities have become their own genre, and in this case the child is the eldest son of author Joe McGinniss, who wrote true crime books before true crime had become a genre. The son, with the same name as his father, writes about his father’s life and their troubled relationship as juxtaposed against his own eventually complicated relationship with his son. The elder McGinness, it turns out, was both a talented writer and a tortured addict who largely neglected his children, and he ultimately squandered his opportunities and his fortune; this book is his son’s reckoning with his troubled family history. Some of the passages about the youngest McGinness son’s basketball efforts and the pressure his father put him under went on a bit too long for my taste even if they were relevant to the overall story, but for the most part McGinniss Jr. is a fine writer, and he tries to come to a hopeful conclusion even as much about his father’s decline was frustrating and sad. Having known little about either of them before reading this book, I was left wanting to read other books by both McGinniss men.