After Visiting Friends: A Son's Story

by Michael Hainey

Michael Hainey had just turned six when his uncle knocked on his family’s back door one morning with the tragic news: Bob Hainey, Michael’s father, was found alone near his car on Chicago’s North Side, dead, of an apparent heart attack. Thirty-five years old, a young assistant copy desk chief at the Chicago Sun-Times, Bob was a bright and shining star in the competitive, hard-living world of newspapers, one that involved booze-soaked nights that bled into dawn. And then suddenly he was gone, leaving behind a young widow, two sons, a fractured family—and questions surrounding the mysterious nature of his death that would obsess Michael throughout adolescence and long into adulthood. Finally, roughly his father’s age when he died, and a seasoned reporter himself, Michael set out to learn what happened that night. Died “after visiting friends,” the obituaries said. But the details beyond that were inconsistent. What friends? Where? At the heart of his quest is Michael’s all-too-silent, opaque mother, a woman of great courage and tenacity—and a steely determination not to look back. Prodding and cajoling his relatives, and working through a network of his father’s buddies who abide by an honor code of silence and secrecy, Michael sees beyond the long-held myths and ultimately reconciles the father he’d imagined with the one he comes to know—and in the journey discovers new truths about his mother.

A stirring portrait of a family and its legacy of secrets, After Visiting Friends is the story of a son who goes in search of the truth and finds not only his father, but a rare window into a world of men and newspapers and fierce loyalties that no longer exists.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Book Club, Biography, Mystery, Biography Memoir, True Crime

307 pages, Hardcover

First published February 19, 2013

About the author

Michael Hainey was born in Chicago. He has sold fruits and vegetables; worked as a laborer on a road-repair crew; been a dish-washer; cooked cafeteria food; and sold men's clothes. For the last few years, he has been a magazine writer and editor. Currently, he is the deputy editor of GQ. He lives in Manhattan.

Reviews

[Aharon · Rating 2 out of 5]

One of those books. That tries to create a sense of poetry. Mystery. Drama. Through sentence fragments. And that maybe. Just maybe. Should have been. Nothing more than an article. In a magazine.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not an amazing story; it is the telling of it that is.
Michael Hainey lost his father, a copy editor at a Chicago newspaper, when he was six, and, like a lot of families, his didn't discuss it further. They took the official version at face value and got on with it. But a boy who loses his father can never really just get on with it. Using his skills a journalist, Hainey goes on to find out the story of who is father was and how he died. While Hainey doggedly follows his need to know, he is also very sensitive and loyal to his mother, and that is the beauty of this book.
I was glad to finish this book in the privacy of my room, where I could cry all over it.

[Carmen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Michael Hainey is a journalist. He starts looking into his father's death when he is in his mid-thirties. The various obituaries are not meshing. He approaches this whole thing as a journalist - as an investigative reporter. The crux of the matter is his father had a mistress and he died in that mistress's bed.

WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE
- The book is boring. I would be fascinated (FASCINATED) by this story if Hainey was my father or grandfather. I, of course, think family history is very important. And it is important to interview family members about their lives, jobs, romantic stories, funny stories, etc. etc. before they pass away. It's important to write this family history down and record it while family members are still living. It's horrible to wind up with black-and-white pictures of family members and no longer having anyone living identify them.

So, if Hainey ever has any kids (I know he has a nephew and a niece), they will probably really enjoy and value this book. His nephew will really value this book. I'm sure his cousins and other relatives really will value and cherish this book. It is a great piece and chronicle of family history.

But it's not MY family. So I just can't bring myself to care. Much like I don't care about any of my friends' aunts and uncles, grandparents, and cousins, I absolutely do not care about this stranger's family history and family stories. I don't care. I have zero interest.

- He really approaches this as an investigative journalist. He only briefly touches on how his investigation will affect the lives of others. At the end, he seems more concerned with how his discoveries will affect his mother and his brother, but I wanted more psychology and more emotion. I mean, you're publishing a book that says that your father is a cheater, disloyal to your mother. Don't you think that might be damaging to your family? He never addresses this. NEVER. I was like, "What does your MOM think about all this!?!?!?!?" Is she just fine with you airing her dirty linens in public?

- Hainey's father died when Hainey was 6. Hainey constantly, constantly fantasizes about his father's death. For decades, he lies in bed every night, and before falling asleep he imagines and envisions his father's last night on earth. In detail. With conversations and dialogue between his dad and his dad's friends. Sometimes I found this a bit weird and obsessive. I've talked to some other people who lost their dad as children-under-the-age-of-10, and they claim they do not do this. My one friend said, "I think about my father, and I miss him. It makes me sad that I never got to know him better. But I never created imaginary scenarios about his death, or thought often about the exact physical circumstances surrounding his death."

However, I understand everyone grieves differently and deals with death differently. But I'd be lying if I said his extreme obsession with his father's death (not his FATHER, his father's DEATH) to be a bit strange.

- The book is very male, and very man-centered. It's all fathers and sons, men did this, men didn't do this, men are like this, men aren't like that. Men, men, men. He really, truly loves his mother and grandmother - this is very obvious. I'm not saying that he's disrespectful or ignoring them. But he seems to view life and also family through the male line and what the males in his family have accomplished. I'm just saying: be prepared for tons of "men are ____" statements, and "when the men built x" and etc. etc. etc. He also talks about his nephew often but barely mentions his niece. I have no idea whether this is because the niece is adopted and therefore 'not blood' or if it's because she's a female.

WHAT I DID LIKE
- Hainey is a good writer. He's no slouch.

- Chicago. You learn so much about Chicago from this book. Chicago is actually like a character in this book. He describes so many parts of Chicago and its suburbs and its food and its people in loving detail. If you live in Chicago, you will recognize and be familiar with things and will be nodding your head and smiling on nearly every page. If you are not a Chicago native, you will learn a lot about Chicago. (I felt the same way - except with London - with Rowling's Cormoran Strike series that I recently read). It's so fun to visit other places and "travel the world" through books. You can get quite an education! Since I got to 'visit' both London and Chicago this week, I feel like a lucky (and rich) woman! :) LOL

- Polish-American family. He is very Polish-American and his Polish-American traditions, roots, foods, customs, and sayings are rich and scattered throughout the book. If you are Polish-American, I'm sure you will be nodding your head and smiling at a lot of things he says and things his mother and grandmother do and say. The Polish community is very strong in Chicago, and he vividly brings this to life.

- Getting an inside look at newspapers and journalism circa 1950s and 1960s.
...

Tl;dr - I didn't even start enjoying this book until page 134 or so. So you have to slog through over 100 pages of boredom before you get to a bit of an interesting part. The interesting parts are very few and far between. Hainey is a good writer, but I'm sorry to say that the subject matter is simply uninteresting.

[Terry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned about this book by watching an interview with Michael Hainey on the local Chicago PBS station, and was intrigued enough to order it right away. On so many levels this is a wonderful read. If you are interested in old style journalism and the role of a newspaper copy editor, the relationship of the press to the police, and the hard living in the night with the compartmentalization of family during the day, it is an amazing view into that world. For Chicagoans, it opens up a potpourri of the 1950s and 60s spots and neighborhoods that reveal the real neighborhood and ethnic culture of this great city. Narrated by someone who moved away physically but never in spirit, it is all the more touching and nostalgic. But the heart of this story is the quest for his father, an emotional and deeply moving story of a boy who yearns to know and understand the most important influence in his life, even if the father died when the author was 6.

The story was gripping, and I devoured it. But what makes this book outstanding is the reporting. The parallels between son and father are revealed not only the content, but by the journalistic process. The dogged, grueling process of uncovering the truth, checking all the facts, putting up with people who lie or hang up, and the plodding - or exhilarating - process of talking to contacts -- Hainey doesn't spare anything. But because of the deep emotion going on, every dead end lets us down, too. We're on the same mission and emotional rollercoaster. A superlatively crafted and rewarding book.

[Lou · Rating 5 out of 5]

A family past revisited.
Tragedy in a death under questionable circumstances.
A son wants to find the truth and wants not to upset his mother in unraveling the past.
In this story of truth the author has give us a poignant and wonderful look into his life and strung it swell together in great words in the right places.
In his search he makes the reader look within his or her life, at the greater things that need to be taken account of.
He had me thoroughly captivated in this story.
Defiantly one not to miss for 2013 that will be hitting Best of Lists through the year.

“For a good hundred years, there was nothing like it on earth. An entire square mile of Chicago, devoted to butchering cattle and hogs or any other beast a man could ship from America’s hinterlands-our prairies and plains- turning it into canned meat, churning all of it into the bounty of America. This was the land of swift, the kingdom of Armour. Chicago as the dis-assembly line. Chicago-how fast and how efficiently a creature could be reduced. Rendered. Broken down.
On summer nights, when the wind blew off the lake, the stench of death and dung hung over the whole city. My grandmother told me that some nights in her bed, she’d be awakened by what she called “the sad groaning”-beasts in the dark, all those miles away. Chicago.”

“My father was the Night Slot Man. Thats a newspaper term. From the time he is a young boy of six or seven in Dust Bowl Nebraska, back in the depression, all he wants is to work in newspapers. All he wants is to escape, to get to Chicago and be a newspapermen, just like his bother.”

“She begins to see there is a world beyond the world she knows. A world of smart, knowing men. A world at the center of the world. A world that knows whats happening. A world where things happen.”


“All through her childhood, whenever you ask her a question about her life or what she is doing or where she is going, she will fix you in her gaze and say to you, her son: “Don't ask me about my business.”
Omerta.”

“Omerta.
After he died, silence descends. Silence and fear. My twin poles: my binary back holes. I live in fear of upsetting my mother, of even uttering my fathers name. I believe that even by saying his name, I might kill her. Or, she might kill me.
Three of us remained. Three atoms that retreat to the outer edges of our chamber. A nuclear family flawed, reduced. We drift apart. Unable to bond. Not knowing how. Survivors who stagger into a shelter or a bombed-out ruin, each eyeing the others from our shadowy corner. Wondering. Calculating.
He died and we never spoke again about him. Every once in a while, id find the courage to ask about him. Every once in a while, the questions nagging in my head-How did he die?-would become too much and id forget the rules and ask.”

“I understand you now, those of you who build your roadside shrines.
Your frail white cross, lashed to the guard-rail. Two wooden garden stakes bound with rusted wire. Your son”s name, stencilled. Or your wife's. A plastic bouquet. Faded flag. We see your shrine as we speed by, rounding a curve. A glint of colour catches our eye. Maybe remnants of that weathered teddy bear. All of it marking that place where someone loved left the road.
The sod black and torn. The gap in the guardrail. The tree trunk, shorn.
It is our need to mark. To witness. Our need to create scared ground.
“History happened here,” guidebooks like to say.
No, we say-personal history ended here.”

“To this day, still, I scavenge for scraps in the hearts and minds of men I meet. Forever searching, believing the answers are out there. Somewhere.
Because we without fathers must out of necessity create ourselves. Its true that “necessity is the mother of invention.” But for those of us without fathers, there is a deeper truth-necessity is the mother of self-invention.”

Also @ http://more2read.com/review/after-visiting-friends-a-sons-story-by-michael-hainey

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is, hands down, one of the best books I've ever read.

Michael Hainey is a brilliant writer, and he has a fascinating story to tell that is made all the more moving by his own straightforward narrative style and the keep-it-inside-yourself emotional control of his mother.

When Michael was 6 and living in Chicago, his father, a copy editor for the Chicago Sun-Times, died of what was reported as a heart attack. The book's title comes from a line in the obits that ran in four of Chicago's papers, saying Robert Hainey died "after visiting friends."

Michael, an editor at GQ, inherited his father's desire to be a journalist, and the gaping hole that came from growing up without a dad and without anyone in the family ever speaking about the matter.

And so, about a decade ago, he began to sleuth the real facts about what happened to his father that night. If this book had just been about that journey, it would have been good. But what made it brilliant were the additional scenes of Chicago in the era of the 60s, and its newspaper life, the rural town in Nebraska where his father had come from, even the poignantly naive love note his father wrote to his high school sweetheart. And then there are the people he meets along the way during his quest and sketches to perfection as they become part of the canvas themselves.

I will not give away what Michael discovered, but almost as big an issue as what he found out was whether he could tell his mother what he had been doing and what he'd uncovered.

This is a journey of great yearning, loss, passion and, eventually, reconciliation.

And the descriptive writing, of both people and places, is superb.

I have to believe that Robert Hainey would have been immensely proud of his son. I was certainly privileged to have been let into their lives in the pages of this book.

Run, run to get this.

[Shannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came upon After Visiting Friends accidentally. Well, not exactly accidentally. I picked it up from the library after my husband requested it. It was sitting on the sofa a few days ago and I picked it up and read the flap. Then I read the first chapter. Then I told my husband he would have to wait to read it. I was going to read it first. Luckily, he is an understanding man and the book was so intriguing that I finished it in about 2 days.

It's unlikely I would ever have requested this book from the library on my own. I don't read much non-fiction, so I would have assumed that I wouldn't enjoy this book. What an error that assumption would be. I loved this book.

I loved the way Hainey took me back in time to another era in Chicago - a time when newspapers were printed (not posted) and a boy grew up dreaming of being a newspaperman. That boy was Hainey's dad and he died when the author was six years old. In many ways, Hainey's life could not have been more different from my own. I was raised in the South in the 80s. Hainey grew up in Chicago in the 70s. Yet I could relate to the culture of silence that surrounded his father's death. His mother's approach to dealing with the death of her husband: don't talk about it. For years her son complied outwardly with this unspoken edict, but the reporter within him was simmering to know the truth.

I loved the way the author used his skills as a reporter to find out the truth of his father's life and death. I enjoyed seeing a journalist work the story and follow the sources in a decades old story. And while I didn't necessarily agree with old reporters who closed ranks to keep the secrets of a dead friend, I did respect the way they followed their own code of friendship.

It's hard for me to predict how wide ranging the appeal of this book will be. I loved it for the way it evoked a time and place, for the way Hainey's writing was both deeply personal and easy to relate to and for a son's heartfelt desire to find the story of a father he barely remembered. If nothing else, I think those who love newspapers, the city of Chicago and excellent writing will like this book.

After Visiting Friends is a book with writing that is easy to read, yet left me feeling like I visited a specific time and place - both in body and spirit. I loved the journey.

[Sharon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wrote a review in The Nervous Breakdown, which begins:

I can’t write this review without disclosing that After Visiting Friends is my story. Or so it felt, as I read. Like Hainey, I am a member of what he calls the DFC, the Dead Father’s Club. Hainey was six when his father died at age 36 in Chicago. I was seven when my father died at 32 in Detroit. A veil of silence hung over the details throughout Hainey’s childhood. And mine.

I was mesmerized by this memoir, about a son reconstructing the life of his lost parent. Not least because Hainey’s prose is so gorgeous. Part Raymond Carver, part Raymond Chandler, with a little Nick Flynn thrown in. But also because of the similarity of our experiences. When I read this line, it made me finally feel understood: “For most of my life I have believed I was never going to outlive my father, that I would never make it to thirty-six. I believed his sentence was my sentence.”

See the rest of my review here:
http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/sh...

[Julie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Listening to this book was a pleasant and undemanding experience. I enjoyed the narrator's soothing tones. A son spends a good part of his life trying to comprehend the circumstances of his father's death and in turn understand more about himself. My favorite quote:
"Son of bones what am iI but a ghost chained up to a skeleton? The clack and the clatter of him as I drag him around the room. Up and down these streets. Through my life."

[Gwen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm sorry the author was so distraught about the death of his father and the questions surrounding it, but the reality of the situation seemed obvious to me from the start, and it seemed to take a frustratingly long time for him to reach the inevitable conclusion. It might have been a better essay than book.

[Mary Lou · Rating 4 out of 5]

After Visiting Friends A Son’s Story by Michael Hainey is much like a suspense or mystery novel in that the author is searching for the facts about his father’s death, something that has puzzled him ever since it happened when he was six. By the time he graduates from high school, he knows that his father’s death certificate and multiple obituaries are incongruent. One write-up says nothing about the circumstances of the death, another says it was on the street after he left a friend’s home, and a third says “while visiting friends” (71). The newspapers say the cause was a heart attack; the death certificate, an aneurysm. The later spells Hainey without the “i.”

Although Michael Hainey is very close to his mother and his maternal grandmother, and definitely doesn’t want to upset his mother by dragging up anything unpleasant, he is driven to find out what really happened to his father. Dogged searches to find people who knew Bob Hainey and many trips to meet and talk to these people gradually pay off.

Hainey intersperses his ten-year investigation with information about his family and his childhood and records the substantial changes in journalism that occur between 1970 and the present as well. For example, Jim Hoge, editor of the Chicago Sun Times in 1970, says, “…when your father and I came up, there were still guys on the paper who had covered Capone and the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre. They’d covered Dillinger. The year your dad died—it was a moment between two eras. Between The Front Page and the Information Age. These were guys who saw journalism not as a profession that you needed a college degree for. For them it was a job. And most of all, it was a kind of game. It was all about the scoop. About getting the story first. These guys taught us how to do second story work” (sneaking upstairs to steal photos) (195).

Regarding Bob Hainey, Hoge says, “…not many men could do your father’s job. You had to be almost a machine. Every story in the paper goes through his team and him. He was the fulcrum. I think part of the cost of that was you had to bury your emotions. You couldn’t lose your cool. … You know you could not push your old man. He could really verbally abuse someone. You had to watch out for the trigger” (198).

From a peer of his father’s, also now an editor, Michael Hainey hears, “You know your dad was the night slot man, right? So, picture a big horseshoe shaped desk, and around it sit six or eight guys. These are the copy editors; … Your dad sat inside the horseshoe. … Every story goes to him. …The night slot man makes sure the story is solid…. Slot Man was like doing air-traffic control” (190).

Spoiler alert. Summary below.

All of the newspapermen Michael Hainey talks to mention daily, heavy drinking.

When Michael Hainey tells his brother what he learns, Chris Hainey contributes the insight: “You can scream all you want about what happened in the past, but nothing’s going to change. The past gives you no justice. … The past doesn’t pay. We pay. And we’re all free to decide when we’ve had enough” (289).

Barbara Hainey’s reaction is to emphasize that Bob Hainey loved his sons, and allow, “I’m not sure your father was a happy man. He had his demons” (298). Michael Hainey learns that his dad was physically abusive, and that while his mom is not surprised or upset about the idea of an affair, she won’t make excuses for her husband. Michael Hainey feels closer to his mom than ever as they talk, and concludes, “Here I am—a son who went looking for this father, and found his mother” (299).

Michael Hainey learns that his dad was having an affair with a co-worker who adored him, that he died in her bed, that she is now dead and that his uncle, the police and his dad’s peers conspired to keep the facts from Bob Hainey’s wife and family.

Hainey learns the truth from Craig Klugman: “I know that your father died in her bed” (223). Tom Moffet, a man who believes the secret should be kept, that it is “The newpaperman’s code,” but who also knows “what it is like to seek the truth from others, but not be told it. Moffet says, “I was your dad’s alibi. Nights he was out with Bobbie, I was your dad’s cover story. …The morning after he died, your mother called me. … I don’t regret the lie. I did what I had to do. …the cops and your uncle and Bobbie were trying to rewrite the ending. To keep it from drawing in you and your brother and your mother. Their hearts were in the right place” (229-231).

[Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

The set-up's rich with potential in this family memoir: when author Michael Hainey was six years old, his uncle showed up at their Chicago home one morning to tell everyone that his brother Bob--Michael's dad--was dead. Died of a heart attack, alone on the street, "after visiting friends" the night before. Bob was 35, a respected, hard-drinking night editor at the Chicago Sun-Times, and he left behind his lovely, taciturn wife, and two sons, including Michael. End of story. Though of course, not at all. Michael mourned, fretted and wondered and OBSESSED over his dad's death for decades, and once he became a newspaperman himself, decided to find out the truth behind what happened that night, and so spent years tracking down and interviewing everyone who knew his father during that time. Could be good, right? And the setting for much of the tale, the hard-drinking world of 1950s and '60s Chicago newspapermen, has lots of promise as well. Thing is, for me, despite the heavy hints of menace Michael throws into the tale, the whole endeavor turned out to be a huge amount of energy and effort for... well, I'm not going to give it away, but it really should have been "end of story" back when Michael was six, plus a not-terribly-scandalous coda. And it's not just the shruggable ending that left me, um, shrugging. Yes, it's sad for a boy to lose his father, and it's likely to alter, and even define, the trajectory of the family's life, but I had a hard time identifying with Michael's daily, hourly obsession with the event throughout his entire life: youth, adolescence, college, adulthood, career, loves, pain, successes, failures all of it, overshadowed by his dad's death. Or, at least, that's the way he tells it. Speaking of "the way he tells it", Hainey's telegraphic, staccato style wore thin for me pretty early on, and it only seemed more affected and unnecessary as the memoir progressed. There's is good stuff here, but not enough of it.

[Nikki · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was not quite what I expected after skimming a couple of reviews; I think it was even better.

Michael Hainey's father, a Chicago newspaperman, died in 1970 when the younger Hainey was six years old and his brother two years older. Little was said about him after that, or about the manner of his death -- just that he had had a heart attack at 35. As Michael grew up and became a journalist himself, various parts of the story did not add up. When he reached the age at which his father had died, he began to investigate in earnest, After many difficulties, he learned the truth -- or rather, many truths.

After Visiting Friends kept me fascinated from beginning to end. It's not only the story of a great family history investigation, but a meditation on fathers and sons, and the larger topic of family. With side trips to Nebraska and California, it's also a great Chicago story. Very highly recommended.

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm a fan of mysteries involving journalists and/or journalism. I'd read the review of Michael Hainey's book in the New York Times and thought this would be an incredibly interesting read — a son trying to unravel the mystery surrounding his newspaperman father's death.

While Hainey's writing style is crisp and engaging, I just couldn't get into the "hunt for the truth." Perhaps I expected the truth to be much more interesting, and I guess there's not much Hainey can do about that lest he want to turn the memoir into a novel.

Overall, not a bad read. Hainey introduces us to some interesting newspaper characters along the way, which was nice. I guess I was just expecting a more satisfying conclusion considering the build-up.

[Marianne · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are a number of reasons why I picked up this book – I am a print journalist and while our office works differently, it was part of the story I knew I could relate to. The second reason I checked this story out was because of the main story line – son loses father then finds out years later that there was more to the story. Again, something that I could relate to as an adoptee who found out years later she was adopted.

What I am shocked to discover while reading books like this, is how it seems that people seem to make the right decision (to keep a secret) but they never really think about the consequences of those secrets. While one’s heart may be in the right place or there is a misguided need to protect those we love, the actual damage caused by life changing lies seems to not even come into play.

Stories like this make me grateful that while I myself looked like a fool in some ways for being an open book, my children on the other hand, will not be blindsided by discoveries after I am gone. I would sooner answer uncomfortable questions now than have my children’s lives destroyed after I die, should there be a life changing secret buried somewhere that I had forgotten about (which is why I wrote my personal memoir).

I commend the author for sharing his story as many people knew who his father was; to reveal the fact that he was leading a double life without his family’s knowledge is very brave. It is my hope that the author has finally been able to come to grips with a past that isn’t totally his, and been able to find happiness for himself, now that he has solved the biggest mystery of his life and discovered who his father really was.

Marianne Curtis
Author
Finding Gloria
Moondust and Madness: A collection of Poetry
Finding Gloria ~ Special Edition

[Kristine Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a wonderful book on so many levels! It took me a chapter or two to fall into the rhythm of the narrative—but when I let go of watching for tense changes and sentence structure, the stream of consciousness writing made the story even more powerful. I loved seeing inside the lost world of old school newspaper journalism, where characters were celebrated instead of flattened into mass marketed uniformity, and where the honor code of the brotherhood was an ironbound reality. How I would love to have been able to sit and drink with those guys! But the strongest images I carried away were of the women who were both part of and shut out of that world. I tear up every time I think of Michael’s mom emptying the ice she never used into the sink every night and imagine the bravery and resolve that kept her moving forward, alone with her two little boys. I loved that Michael came to understand and appreciate that strength and its unquestioning focus, and the fierce love that drove it—also the complexity of his parents’ relationship, invisible to the 6-year old self that Michael couldn’t ever really grow out of without his search. Even if you aren't a reader of non-fiction, you won't be able to put this book down--I tore right through it!

[Gabriel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Told in sparse but wonderfully descriptive prose "After Visiting Friends" is required reading for anyone who lost a parent at a young age or is interested in reconnecting with a mom or dad after the lines of communication have been muted. The riveting tale of a son's search for the truth about the night his father died has applications for anyone who is interested in the distinction between truth and reality about the people that raised them. It's further devastating when one of those parents is on a pedestal that eventually gets kicked over but "Friends" is reassuring in its spare prose that parents are humans too and the sooner we realize that, the more likely one is to put their own relationships with family into a far better perspective. It's an mesmerizing read told with a crisp, quick and sometimes biting effectiveness and can most likely be gobbled in a few hours of reading. It is also a personal look at the world of journalism in the turbulent years of the late 60's in Daley's Chicago. A time when cops and beat reporters were on the same page and their camaraderie and loyalty to one another were sacrosanct. So much so that it takes 40 years for a boy to discover the truth about a father (and mother) he barely had to time to know.

[Deborah Klein · Rating 2 out of 5]

Do not know how this book got the reviews it did. It is about as riveting as my Uncle Bob's war stories. If this were a movie, you'd see lots of meaningful glances, hard boiled "Mad Men" chatter, good time Susies and Sams, hear the swelling music, and see one lonely boy, trying to figure out his place in the world. Of course his Dad was the "best man in the business; the best I've ever known". His mother was the most beautiful girl in the newsroom. Otherwise, why write a book? But in fact, the author's family is unremarkable, his story is unremarkable, his father's death is (reverse spoiler, I guess) unremarkable if messy, and this whole effort is a complete waste of time. Anyone reading this has a family story or two at least as interesting and could write it with less hyperbole and foreshadowing to probably better effect. And use better sentence structure.

The only thing I found interesting was the detailing of Park Ridge where I have family. They live near the author's family home, attend and receive schooling at Mary, Seat of Wisdom etc. and have been in the area for generations, so they got a kick out of the locales. That was about it.

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

What makes this one of the best memoirs I've read in a long time is that it’s fundamentally a work of beautiful and unflinching reportage. After years of being obsessed over the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of his father, a consummate Chicago newspaperman who was felled by an apparent heart attack at age 35, Hainey (who was six when it happened) digs deep into his family’s past to uncover the truth. He’s especially tipped off by one obituary that says his father died “after visiting friends,” and his pursuit begins in earnest: phone calls to his father’s surviving friends and colleagues, a trip to his hometown in Nebraska, and encounters with unsuspecting relatives (including his laconic but winningly tenacious mother, who seems to be allergic to the past). Hainey delivers not just a profoundly personal investigation of family and a lovingly evocative portrait of Chicago, but by putting his father’s life into focus he renders a kind of bygone midcentury manhood that revolved around secrecy, honor, and fierce loyalty between men. It’s brilliant and haunting.

[Sunny Shore · Rating 5 out of 5]

I couldn't put this book down. The story of a family torn up by the mysterious death of the newspaperman father was so riveting. Michael Hainey, who was 6 when his dad was found on the street after supposedly dead from a heart attack at age 35, digs deep to tell the story of his family and how he went about finding the truth. How this death in 1970 changed everyone, how Hainey interviews people that his father knew, how a young boy can be changed in a single moment. Everything around him changed, as a result of the death of his father after visiting friends when his night shift at Chicago Sun-times is done. Michael Hainey, a writer for GQ Magazine, must uncover what really happened to his father in an age before technology and had to do this after many who were the "players" in this mystery had died. I recommend this book highly as a memoir, a mystery, investigative reporting and a family story.

[Emmkay · Rating 3 out of 5]

Michael Hainey is a journalist, deputy editor of GQ. But he is also a fatherless child filled with ‘what ifs’ - his dad, a Chicago newspaperman, died suddenly of an aneurysm when Michael was in kindergarten. Spotting a discrepancy between what he and his mother were told of the circumstances and the published obituaries, Hainey puts his journalistic skills to work investigating the night his father died. I enjoyed the picture he painted of Chicago and the newspaper business in the 1960s. The impressionistic prose fillled with short sentences is sometimes quite effective and sometimes a bit much. This is a man’s book in a lot of ways, and I was more interested in the female experience, which he addresses to a certain point but which is not his main focus - his mother was a bright young worker at a newspaper too, but was deemed part of the “Maidenform Mafia” by the men in the office, and shifted into life as a housewife once she married, then life as a young widow afterwards. I wondered about her, and the other women in the story.

[Kristina · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Life, I learned then, belongs not to the just but to those who do whatever they must do in order to maintain their vision of reality.”

I NEVER read a memoir in one sitting; I usually need to psych myself up to move through biographies. However, this memoir was phenomenally well-written, engaging, and heartbreaking. And there wasn’t anything remarkably earth-shattering here, just common family secrets, traditional silences, and pieces left behind when a life ends suddenly. Who are our parents really? How lost can we get in the past and “what-might-have-been?” Mr. Hainey was brave enough to answer these questions and found in the answers a deeper love for his mother and ultimately his life. Highly recommended!

[Gail · Rating 3 out of 5]

With my life as a (former) journalist and fond memories of the profession (both good and bad), as soon as I heard the plot of this book, I was totally intrigued. After Visiting Friends tells the true story of a son (the author)'s attempts to uncover what really happened the night his father, Bob Hainey, a well-respected Chicago newspaperman, died mysteriously in 1970. Himself a reporter (and now around his father's age), Michael spent nearly a decade reporting for this book. His details in it are meticulous and rich and I found myself TOTALLY sucked into the story. In the end, learning how and where Michael's father meet his demise take a backseat to Michael's story, a son desperate to move past this all-consuming trauma in his life and needing the answers he discovers along the way to do so. (Also, I had THE most surreal moment reading this book—in a passage where Michael talks about finding former reporter "friends" of his father, he mentions Googling (and then visiting for an interview) a Craig Klugman of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. Ummmm.....I INTERVIEWED AND WAS OFFERED A JOB BY CRAIG! (I turned it down, in the end, because the move wasn't right for us at the time, but still!) Definitely one of the craziest happenstances I've come across in my years as a reader!)

Passages I Want to Remember: He died and we never spoke about him. Every once in a while, I'd find the courage to ask about him. Every once in a while, the question nagging in my head—How did he die?—would become too much and I'd forget the rules and ask. // In the end, he lived on in scrapbooks. Six of them. Brittle, faded pages bound with string. Out of these fragments, over the years, I created his narrative. And my narrative.

Would I Recommend? ABSOLUTELY. Especially for anyone who likes non-fiction, true crime (there's no real "crime" here, per say, but it reads like a whodunit), and a good work of journalism.

[Squirrel Circus · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best indicator of how much I liked this book is the fact that I finished it about 48 hours after receiving it from the publisher (thanks to Early Reviewers!). I read it at work, standing up in the kitchen while making dinner, and in the carpool line to pick up the kids at school. Seriously. It's that much of a page turner. Michael Hainey has a talent for storytelling and has perfected the slow reveal. He draws nuanced portraits of his family and of the newspaper "game" in 1960s Chicago, which is difficult to separate from family, in his case -- both his uncle and his father were newspapermen. I'm not spoiling the memoir by telling you that Hainey's father died under what he grows to believe were suspicious circumstances, in 1971 -- it's the central theme of the story. Hainey does a masterful job of conveying the impact this early loss had on his life, without "whining" -- which seems to be difficult to manage in many memoirs. Just a terrific read!

[Ellen Kobe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Michael Hainey's story is incredible on many levels. As a reader, I became completely invested in his story, which I think is one of the greatest challenges memoir/personal creative nonfiction authors have. As a journalist, I found this book extremely interesting as he does investigative reporting on himself. Half of the book was researched based, and I enjoyed seeing his strategies for digging up his family's past.

Furthermore, Hainey is the kind of writer we should all strive to be: descriptive, to the point, rhythmic and chilling when he needs to be. He paints a beautiful picture of Chicago newspapermen in the past and recounts memories from his childhood as if they happened yesterday. Ultimately, his conclusion at the end is unexpected and beautiful.

I really cannot say enough good things about this book -- recommended to everyone who appreciates research-based creative nonfiction or has always wondered about their family secrets.

[Minty McBunny · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read a review of this book in EW and promptly put myself in the queue for it at my library. Then I waited for months until I finally got my hands on it this week. My wait was not in vain!

This story is told so simply, but the longing of Michael Hainey for any scrap of his father is evident in every word. I had visible chills several times while reading it & I found myself tearing up quite a bit in places as well. It's not only a document of a young man's search for the truth about his father's life and untimely, mysterious death, but a finely crafted family history and a slice of life straight out of the Mad Men playbook. I really enjoyed it immensely and would recommend it to anyone.

[Lincoln · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a damn good book - depressing and sad to journey thru but beautifully crafted, researched and presented. We all create narratives on who we think our parents are - and ignore the obvious flaws and demons which surely they face and have.

The book is also a revealing portrait of a world of journalism, of a Mad Men styled old boys network who took care of each other and made sure the right stories get told about individuals, even though they are not wholly true.

Read this in one sitting, just do it in a sunny place with a fat warm kitten sitting in your lap to cheer you up.

[Cindy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not to spoil the ending but I expected more of a revelation to the ending. I mean, you know the author is searching for how his father really died but ehh, not that much to it. It was ok though. I liked reading about 60s and early 70s Chicago.

[Jenny · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really loved this. Dad, you should read it.

[Shira · Rating 3 out of 5]

this book was sad and weird and about 100 pages too long