Tom Matlack - The Good Men Project: Real Stories From the Front Lines of Modern Manhood

Copyright 2009 by The Good Men Foundation

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.

Published by The Good Men Foundation

143 Newbury Street, Sixth Floor

Boston, Massachusetts 02116

Book Design by Poulin + Morris Inc.

Cover Photography by Stephen Sheffield

Interior Photography by Tyla Arabas, Stephen Sheffield, Jos Zaragoza

Edited by Larry Bean

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request

ISBN-10: 0-615-31674-3

ISBN-13: 9780615316741

Printed in the United States of America

For my father, Jamie, and my daughters, Isabelle and Abigail.

JDH

For Mike and Jack.

LFB

For Cole, Seamus, Will, and James Matlack.

In memory of Jesse Yaukey and Robert Matlack.

Good men all.

TNM

James Houghton

Tom Matlack

Robert Pinsky

Perry Glasser

Steve Almond

Jeffrey K. Wallace

John Oliver

Stephen Karl Klotz

Joel Schwartzberg

Norm Appel

Stuart Horwitz

Rolf Gates

Christopher Koehler

Tom Matlack

Kent George

Keith Ackers

Ricardo Federico

Paul Furtaw

John Sheehy

Bruce Ellman

James Houghton

Jesse Kornbluth

Cary Wong

Regie OHare Gibson

Joe DArrigo

Amin Ahmad

Mark St. Amant

Charlie LeDuff

Michael Kamber

Julio Medina

Ben Woodbeck

Curtis B.

Andre Tippett

Joseph Levens

Robert Pinsky

James Houghton

It all started a year ago. I was having lunch with Tom, my friend and former partner and boss, to discuss the memoir he was writing. I had just returned from a year abroad with my familya year precipitated as much by a long-held dream to introduce our daughters to another culture as by the decision to wind down the venture capital fund we had started nine years earlier. I had enjoyed Toms draft: The stories of his countercultural childhood and the subsequent turbulence of his personal and professional lives were fascinating. But I could not shake the sense that there was more to the story than the biographical details. While I knew the facts well, something about the telling, about the brutally honest way he described experiences so personal and revealing, evoked both compassion and gratitude. Given that I had been spending a good deal of time thinking about my own story, reflecting on the winding path that had led me abroad and hoping that more perspective on the past would somehow illuminate the way forward, Toms willingness to share his own journey, despite the vast differences in our stories, provided an inspiring sense of connection and perspective.

By the time we sat down to lunch I had not made much progress on the bigger questions of my own life, but I did think Tom was onto something. Toms experiences made me think about the stories of other friendsa married friend who grappled with his sexuality, an entrepreneur confronting his sons heroin addiction, and others who, like me, had less dramatic tales to tell but who had faced difficult choices. I admired not only their strength in the face of these challenges but also their willingness to share their fears and anxieties so openly. To someone who was particularly protective of his own storypartly because of my reserved nature, partly because I had convinced myself that my own concerns were less significant given the advantages I was born withthose moments when other men revealed themselves so completely were revelatory. They gave me courage to share more of my own doubts and fears, and in those moments I felt less alone and more connected.

Might there be something meaningful in gathering a diverse group of men to write essays about difficult or challenging times in their lives and what they had learned from those experiences? Though I had nothing but anecdotal evidence to draw upon, it seemed that the men of our generation spend a lot of time struggling to balance the competing interests of achieving professional success and being good husbands and partners and fathers and sons. And unlike women, who are much better socialized to talk about how these same pressures affect them, we tend to keep those burdens to ourselves. While the stereotype of men retreating to their cave is not new, perhaps if a group of men wrote compelling, well-crafted stories about their lives, other men might recognize a little of themselves in those stories and take comfort in their shared humanity.

Fortunately my vague notions of the power of storytelling dove-tailed with Toms passion to explore defining moments in manhood, and thus The Good Men Project was born. As exciting as the concept was in theory, it soon became clear that there was a lot more involved in publishing a book than coming up with an interesting idea. With our venture capital background, we probably should have expected this. The past year has been a roller coaster of great promise and dashed expectations, of angst and excitement, of doubts and tremendous personal learning. We have debated the content, the theme, and the title of the book. We endured the rejection of fifty publishers who did not believe men would buy a book of essays written by other men. We have argued about distribution and publicity and Web strategy. But throughout it all I have been sustained by the stories and by the men who wrote them.

I have been overwhelmed by the candor and strength of these essays, whether they came from the early contributors and established authors who were willing to take a chance on an unknown team and an unlikely project, or from our numerous friends and family members who, despite limited writing experience, were willing to share some of their most personal and difficult moments, or from the countless contributors who responded to a national essay contest and from whose ranks we were able to draw some of the books most compelling essays. Not only does each writer present a moment or experience that resounds (either directly or indirectly) with my own life, but in their breadth and diversity they offer the proof that everyone has a story to tell and that something can be gained from hearing these stories.

The real significance of the project became clear to me at a small reading and discussion group that we organized a few months ago in Cambridge, Massachusetts. To help start the conversation, each person attending was asked to fill out a note card with an answer to the question, What does it mean to be a good man? Ironically, I had never been asked that question directly, or even attempted to answer it for myself, but when I went to fill out my own card the answer came easily. Despite the pressure we felt at times to make the book more prescriptive, for it to provide easy answers or definitions, the great lesson Ive learned over the past yearfrom every story, every conversation, every reflectionis that there is no definitive answer. Every story in the book, every submission that we read, has reaffirmed the idea that it is much more about the process than the resolution. My response on the note card was asking the question.

Tom Matlack

One of the first times I told my story I was in prison, in a facility in Boston used largely for protective custody, to be exact. My talk was to focus on drug and alcohol abuse, but looking out over the crowd of some sixty inmatesincluding gay prostitutes and pimps who might not survive in the general prison populationI wasnt sure if I could get any words out of my mouth. My heart pounded with fear.