MY PARENTS WERE NOT FORMAL or strict, like some parents in Summit were. Most of my friends’ parents wanted me to call them “Mr.” and “Mrs.” My parents invited other kids to call them by their first names. When it was just the four of us, we were big on nicknames, and we all had several. Dad’s name for Mom was “Piz,” for reasons no one remembers, and all of us called her Milla because she has a scar on her stomach that looks like a millipede. Dad was Dadoo, Doon, Faja; Erica was Tweenie and Smee; and I was Gemhead and Schmoo. At the dinner table, Erica and I weren’t lectured about current events, the way you might imagine because of my father’s job, nor was there a belief that children should be seen and not heard. Both my parents really wanted to know what we’d been up to, and dinner table conversation revolved around our lives—silly things that had happened in the neighbourhood, assignments at school—not theirs.
I knew kids who weren’t allowed to play in their own living rooms, and whose parents’ bedrooms were off limits. But our parents’ bed was a gathering point, the place where Erica and I watched TV until Dad groaned, “Guys, I need to go to sleep.” Our parents genuinely liked hanging out with us. My dad and I rode bikes and fooled around with computers together; for Christmas one year he gave me a stop-motion camera, then taught me to film and edit little animated movies set in the cities I’d built out of Lego. My mom did arts and crafts with me and, because she loved animals, encouraged me to have the kinds of pets other mothers wouldn’t allow: newts, hamsters, mice, birds. Aside from our dog, my dad couldn’t have cared less about animals. A bird held the same appeal for him as a rock, though he was intrigued by one piece of rodent paraphernalia: my hamster exercised on a wheel housed inside a miniature Volkswagen Beetle, which he could drive all over the house. Even my father found that funny.
But he was closer to Erica than to me, or so I felt. She was younger and cuter, and liked to do typical little-girl things: play with Barbies, dance around the house in a sparkly outfit and so on. He “got” her in a way he didn’t get me, because I didn’t like to do typical little-boy things. I was good at the same kind of stuff my mother was: drawing, playing the piano, being alone.
I often seemed to end up on the wrong side of the gender divide. I wound up in the virtually all-girl choir at school, for example, because on the day instruments were assigned in junior band, I wanted to play saxophone. So did all the other boys. The teacher let each of us try out the sax but by the time it was my turn, the mouthpiece was slimy with other kids’ spit and I was quite reluctant to put it in my own mouth. “You don’t seem to have the knack for sax, try the trombone,” the teacher suggested. My arms were a little too short to extend the slide fully, though, which explains why, in grade six, I found myself singing in the choir along with one other thoroughly mortified boy.
Fortunately, his mother wouldn’t let him quit so long as there was still another male warbling away, and Frank and I bonded over our misery and became friends. He was the first boy I ever met who was at all like me: quiet and rule abiding, interested in computers and art. Different. Other kids were dying to be popular; we were dying to get more Pokémon cards.
It was a revelation, having a boy as a friend, because I’d reached the point of actively disliking boys, and not just because they bullied me. I hated the dirt-under-the-fingernails aspect of boys, their in-your-face aggression and yeehaw humour and the way they always seemed to take things one step too far. I’d tried to pretend that I was good with all that when my mother had forced me to hang out with Neil, my most committed bully, but his older brother was kind of crazy and one day he came after us with a nail gun. He was chasing us, yelling, “I’m going to shoot you in the head with this,” whereupon my toughness evaporated and self-preservation took over. I was pleading for my life, until I noticed Neil was unperturbed. He knew this was just guy talk.
I hated guy talk. The issue for me wasn’t embellishment—I was all for adding colourful details and flourishes to my own stories—but the way guys exaggerated in only one direction, to make themselves seem bigger and badder. The language they spoke was too limited to express certain key truths, like the fact that I worried I’d cry if someone punched me in the face, and sometimes felt sick with shame after teasing my sister and calling her names. Either there was something totally fake about guy talk and the way boys interacted, or I was a freak: the only boy who ever felt scared or weak or not good enough.
Shortly after we took the cruise to Bermuda, a tree in our backyard had been hit by lightning, and one day I came home from school to find that a basketball hoop had been installed where the tree had once stood. My dad was adjusting the net, clearly excited. I was not. I’d never had the slightest interest in basketball. He said, “Let’s play!” I threw a few balls, they didn’t go anywhere near the basket, and gave up. My dad urged me to keep trying. “You can make a basket, you’ll see, it just takes practice! Oh. Well, almost … Try getting closer, that’s it! Oh. Well, good try,” etc. I was deplorable. We played for about ten minutes, during which time I failed to make a single basket, then never again. It was like the swimming lessons, soccer, baseball, any sport you care to mention—my dad was always optimistic that he’d finally hit on the thing that would be my athletic breakthrough, and he inevitably wound up disappointed and trying not to show it.
I felt bad too. The hoop had been sunk into cement, so it was now a permanent feature of our property, and my father had clearly had visions of us happily whiling away the summer evenings playing basketball. Later, I’m not sure if it was days or weeks, I climbed up the pole and tied a string to the hoop, then built a cable out of Lego so I could run a little trolley car on it, all the way to the house. I was proud of the way I’d repurposed the hoop and my dad agreed that the contraption I’d built was cool. Then the hoop fell into disrepair, bees built a nest in the net, and basketball was never spoken of again. However, my memory of that brief episode is crystal clear, nearly twenty years later. I’m sure that’s how things went down.
My father is equally sure it’s not. In his crystal-clear memory, basketball is something we liked to do together, along with Lego and watching Star Trek. He’s not claiming we were out there every night shooting hoops until the light failed, but as he remembers it, we did play “21” frequently enough for me to develop a decent shot. I wasn’t so bad after all. He remembers these games just as vividly as I remember that they never occurred. How can two people experience the same events yet interpret and remember them completely differently? How can you ever know what the truth is? These were questions I started to ask myself the year I was eleven, and playing or not playing basketball in my backyard. I wasn’t sophisticated enough to articulate my existential musings with any precision, of course, but I did grasp that reality was a slippery concept. My imaginary world, for instance, often seemed a lot more plausible and logical to me than the real world did. In the real world, I started to realize that year, things were not always as real or true as they seemed.
In Summit, you knew everyone’s mom by sight, even the ones who had jobs outside the home, but a lot of the fathers worked in the city, like mine did, and just weren’t around the school all that much. You could know a kid for two years and have no clue who his dad was.
But everyone knew what my dad looked like, because he was famous. He wasn’t Brad Pitt. Photographers weren’t camped out on our front lawn. But his face was plastered all over buses in New York, and kids at school would say, “Hey, I saw your dad on TV!” To me that was no big deal. He’d been on TV my whole life. He’d never been all that famous before, though.
The first time I realized that his job as host of GMA was different than other jobs he’d had, and somehow made our family special, at least to other people, was during our photo shoot for People. My mother sometimes read the magazine, so I knew that everyone in it was a star or royalty, and that when one of their photographers came to our house to shoot me and Erica running through the sprinkler, it was a big deal. During the shoot I had a sense of pride, but that was nothing compared to what I felt a few weeks later when, standing in the checkout line at the supermarket with my mother, I finally saw the magazine for the first time. The cast of Seinfeld was on the cover, and inside, in a section titled “Happy,” there was the article about my dad’s new job, along with huge photos of him on the set and one of our whole family in Erica’s bedroom, watching her play the violin. My dad looked a little apologetic and embarrassed, my mother looked like she was about to say something sarcastic, and I was sitting on the floor grinning from ear to ear, as though listening to my eight-year-old sister scrape away at a string instrument was my idea of heaven. It was, in other words, the most contrived photograph imaginable, but I was blown away to see it so close to Jerry Seinfeld’s. I eagerly scanned the pages, looking for my own name, and there it was. According to the article I’d urged my dad to take the GMA job: “ ‘Dad, you’re the guy that takes challenges,’ Alex said. ‘If you don’t take a challenge, you won’t be happy.’ ”
I showed my mom, crowing, “Look! It’s us!” She turned five shades of pink and shushed me. My mother is a modest person and being the focus of attention in the grocery store made her visibly uncomfortable.
I liked attention but I wanted it for my own achievements. Being known as the “son of” didn’t make me feel important. Quite the opposite: it emphasized that the only noteworthy thing about me was my dad. It was around this time that I decided I was going to be a scientist—so different from my father that we couldn’t be compared, but still a profession he valued and admired, so he’d be proud of me. Especially after I won the Nobel.
I was proud of my dad and proud that he merited a big article in People. But I hadn’t understood what it would feel like to share him with America, and it didn’t take long for me to realize I didn’t like it. One weekend, we all went to the Short Hills mall, just up the road from Summit. It’s the quintessential upscale American shrine to retail: acres of polished stone and glass, high-end brand names all over the place. But we weren’t there to go to Neiman Marcus or Saks. My parents didn’t throw money around. I knew somehow that my dad was making more of it, though the only evidence was that he’d bought a new car. Nothing else at home had changed. I didn’t get a bigger allowance—just enough to buy a few Pokémon cards and French fries once a week at the school cafeteria—and both my parents were still basically counting down the minutes until they could cut me off altogether. It was always clear that Erica and I would be getting after-school jobs just as soon as there was no chance that my parents could be jailed for violating child labour laws. They wanted us to know the value of a dollar, and in keeping with that theme, we were at the mall to window-shop, mostly.
Dad took me into computer and tech stores to look at all the cool new gadgets I could save up to buy, and Mom took Erica into those girlie tween shops that are crammed with pink clothes to see what piece of glittery plastic jewellery she could get with her allowance. All of us met up again at the food court, which was the height of elegance as far as I was concerned because you could get strawberry-flavoured Italian soda, my favourite. My mother showed us her new cardigan while my sister twirled a cheap bracelet around her wrist. It was a moment of low-key, pure family harmony. And then someone recognized my father.
As soon as that happened, the dynamic shifted, always. It was as though a switch had been flipped in both my parents. My dad was suddenly captivated by his fans, and even my mother, who normally had zero tolerance for phoniness, would pull a Nancy Reagan, smiling adoringly at my father and keeping her mouth shut. Erica and I didn’t become invisible—quite the contrary: we were now under the microscope, or that’s how it felt, anyway. This particular fan interaction dragged on, because we were trapped at the table, eating. Dad couldn’t shake off the small group gathering around us the way he could when we were on the move, walking around town. As kids will, my sister and I got bored and started acting up, trying to win back our parents’ attention. Our mother snapped at us quietly to behave, and the sting of her curtness did settle us down.
After the fans left, though, our family outing was over. The day had been ruined—not by the strangers who interrupted us, apparently, but by me and my sister. Dad’s disapproval, so much scarier than Mom’s reprimand in the moment, hung in the air for hours afterwards. It’s difficult to explain because I don’t remember him ever berating us or being harshly punitive, but both Erica and I feared his disapproval. Nothing made us feel smaller.
Dad had already explained how easy it would be for someone to damage his public image. But I didn’t get it. If millions of Americans watched him, how could the opinion of a few mall walkers in New Jersey matter so much? And what about my opinion? It was frustrating that at a moment’s notice, his attention could be ripped away from me by complete strangers. I wanted him to be as responsive to me as he was to them (it never occurred to me until I reread this paragraph that he might have been acting). There was also something confusing and unsettling about how familiar their behaviour was with my dad. They called him by his first name and acted as if they knew him as well as I did. I guess they thought they did, because he was in their living rooms every morning and he wasn’t an actor, pretending to be a character. He was a journalist, just being himself.
Only, he wasn’t. The guy on TV looked and sounded like my dad, and he sometimes mentioned me and my sister and my mom on the show, but he was not the same person who lived in our house. The Kevin Newman on television was more upbeat and lively. Happier, more outgoing, leading this big life where he chatted enthusiastically with VIPs and movie stars. The Kevin Newman in my own living room was more preoccupied and less engaged. Drowsier and more irritable. After dinner, he got up from the table and started studying for interviews and writing his questions and notes for the next day. Unlike other fathers, who put their kids to bed, he was asleep before we were, at eight o’clock. His friends weren’t VIPs but guys he’d gone to university with, and other dads in our neighbourhood. If there was anything glamorous about his existence, I didn’t see it.
My father was, in a way, two completely different people. On TV, he was supremely confident, no chinks in his armour. At home, he was softer, more sentimental. When he took me to see Titanic he cried at the end, after the old lady tossed her necklace into the ocean. His own grandmother had died not long before, and I guess the woman in the movie reminded him of her. Another thing: on air, he seemed relaxed, but I knew him to be a workhorse, intense and focused. Sometimes the idling engine of the car that came to take him to the studio in the middle of the night would wake me, and I’d peek out the little window over my bed to watch him leave. Even at two a.m., his nose was buried in notes, cramming for the show.
By the time I came downstairs for breakfast, there he was on the small screen in our kitchen, casually talking to the world. Good Morning America was almost always on while my sister and I got ready for school, but my mother was the only one really paying attention. Erica was extremely attentive the day one of her favourite boy bands was on the show, but otherwise, both of us tended to tune out. It was nothing personal. If our dad had been a carpenter, we wouldn’t have wanted to sit around and watch him do carpentry, either. Eventually, too, we would surely have noticed that his public face was different from his private face, that he was more patient with customers than he was at home, or more jokey with suppliers, or whatever. But one big difference about having a father who’s a public figure is that those kinds of discrepancies are much more obvious, and you pick up on them much sooner. I’m guessing that I started to think about my dad as a person—separate from his role as my father, I mean—much earlier than most kids do. I understood, for instance, that the world saw him very differently than I did. People expected him to live grandly, in a mansion on the right side of the tracks in Summit. Railway tracks really did divide our town; on one side, the kids got into trouble all the time at school, and on the other, they wore preppy clothes and lived in sprawling homes with well-groomed lawns and ultra-religious parents. That’s how people thought we lived, too, but our house was essentially a nicely done-up starter home on a modest street at the far edge of an affluent neighbourhood, close enough to the railway tracks that the dishes in the kitchen sometimes rattled slightly when a train went by.
GMA had a “fix-it” segment where they’d go into people’s houses to do minor repairs to teach viewers how they were done, and one time they came to our place to fix a leak in the ceiling. Our house was so small that my mom ran out of surfaces for the trays of submarine sandwiches and fruit she laid out for the crew. The cameramen were apparently in a state of shock: “Kevin Newman lives here?” Both my parents found this story hilarious and satisfying, but I liked it less than they did. I sometimes worried that people looked at me the same way: “You’re Kevin Newman’s kid?” Yet another reason why, if someone didn’t already know, I wasn’t about to volunteer what my dad did for a living.
Some aspects of my dad’s public image were important to him, too important to laugh about. It mattered to him that people knew he was down-to-earth, for instance, and he truly was. The first few years we lived in Summit, there was no direct train access to Manhattan. I remember he had to take a bus, maybe two buses, then transfer to the train in another town. This was the kind of thing my dad would never complain about. He just did it. Only now does it occur to me what a huge hassle this must have been, especially given the hours he worked. And he did it so that the rest of us could live in a nice little town with decent schools.
He also cared about being respected as a journalist. He’d talk about anchors he respected, how many Emmys they’d won, the big stories they’d broken. He very rarely talked about his own work but how it was received and how he was perceived was clearly important to him. Erica still talks about the time in 1998 when she was in a dance recital where all the fathers got together to do a little number, some goofy thing where they all wore tutus. My dad told her he couldn’t participate—what if someone at “Page Six” got hold of a picture of him in a tutu? Erica was crushed. She didn’t understand why someone at “Page Six” would care about her recital, or why our dad would even care about “Page Six.” What was “Page Six,” anyway? I didn’t really know, either, but I did know that even if my dad hadn’t been co-host of GMA, he wouldn’t have wanted to put on a tutu. That was girl stuff, and he was a man. I’m not sure if he ever said anything like that to me quite so baldly, but I knew for a fact that that was how he felt.
I was home from school, sick, a lot that year—so often that even I began to think I was faking it, until the doctor discovered I had mono—and sometimes I’d go with my mom to the train station to pick my dad up after work. A few hours before, he’d have been on TV, animated and enthusiastic, but when he got off the train from New York, he was grey and drawn. I didn’t know why. My mother only told me that he was working really hard, but that didn’t have much explanatory power. My father had told me many times that he’d always dreamed of being a TV journalist, never wanted to do anything else. And I knew he loved work more than anything. Now he had this big job on TV, his dream had come true, everyone at the mall fawned over him—why didn’t he look happy?
I understood what was happening a little better after I appeared on GMA myself. I didn’t go into New York that often, so it was exciting to head in very early with my mother, especially near the holidays, when the bright lights, big city appeal of the place is strongest. GMA was doing a segment on making Christmas cookies, and a bunch of kids, mostly the children of the show’s staff and crew, had been rounded up for it. I’d been in the studio before to visit my dad after work and, once, thrillingly, to hold a baby lion that had appeared on the show. It was cute and heavy and as I recall, a baby bottle was stuffed in its mouth the whole time it was in my arms. But the place seemed different to me when I knew I was going on TV myself. For the first time I was aware how massive the stage was and how many people were running around. I’d never really noticed the tremendous buzz and hum of important activity, or how the tension broke and the mood shifted suddenly during each commercial break. I started to get nervous, waiting to go on. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. “Relax,” someone told me. “Just have fun.”
Next all the kids were hustled over to a kitchen area to sit on stools behind a high countertop covered with balls of dough and plates of green, red and silver sparkles and decorations. I knew enough to shut up when I heard the countdown, “Five, four, three …” then there was silence, a light went on atop the camera, and here was my father, cheery and highly caffeinated. On. So on, in fact, that he seemed more like a guy impersonating my father than my actual father. He was talking to the cooking expert, sounding all excited about these cookies, which I knew for sure he was not, and the cooking expert was trilling, “Place your thumb in the middle of the cookie” but I must not have done it right because next thing I knew, she’d grabbed my thumb and was squishing it into a ball of dough. We weren’t really there to make cookies, I suddenly realized, but to act like we were making cookies. I hadn’t understood this for some reason, though it must have been explained to me, and was at a complete loss as to how to behave. Maybe I was supposed to do what my dad was doing, amp up my personality somehow, but I didn’t know how. Instead, I just sat there with a ball of cookie dough stuck on my thumb. I registered that my father introduced me on air, which made me feel special later, that he’d been proud enough of me to say my name, and then the segment was over and everyone was asking whether I’d had fun and my father was hugging me, saying, “Good job!” I didn’t know what he was talking about. The experience had been a flash of action, over in a second, and I’d just sat there, stunned.
Afterwards we looked at the store windows, elaborately decorated for Christmas, and went to Central Park, where I climbed up on a giant rock and wondered how my dad, who now seemed exactly like my dad again, did it. How did he turn himself on and off like that? It seemed like having a superpower, on a par with being able to make yourself invisible, and I wished I had it, too. Not to be a TV star but to make the bullies stop, to make kids like me.
Yet this magical ability my father had made me wary, too. I felt like I didn’t know what was real about him anymore, and that made me look at him differently. More critically. I still loved him, still looked up to him, still wanted his approval. But instead of focusing on the ways I was disappointing him, I started focusing on the ways he was disappointing me. He didn’t know me well enough to know I’d never like basketball. And he didn’t know how bad it felt to share him with the world, and feel that there was almost nothing left for me.