Author of the week: Michael Hainey

last updated 8 January 2015

Michael Hainey’s father would have been proud of his son, said Rafi Kohan in The New York Observer. For nearly 10 years, the New York City magazine journalist diligently chased a story that had bothered him since childhood: How had his newspaper-editor father met his death, and why wouldn’t anyone talk about it? The hunt took Hainey back to his native Chicago, where, on the morning of April 24, 1970, 35-year-old Bob Hainey died, according to one obituary, of a cerebral hemorrhage that he suffered “while visiting friends.” Michael Hainey was 6 then; he’d be past 35 himself when he started working to end the mystery. “How come, at the funeral, I never met any of these friends?” he says. “None ever came forward and said, ‘I was with your father the night he died.’ I thought, ‘Things just don’t add up.’”

It couldn’t have been easy for Hainey to share the secret he uncovered, said Scott Simon in NPR.org. In his new memoir, After Visiting Friends, he describes how his father’s old drinking buddies mostly pleaded ignorance when he spoke with them but also how he sat on his discovery for more than a year before telling his mother. “I had this great fear,” he says, “that I could lose her love.” The truth, it turns out, had no such effect. “It actually answered questions for her that were 40 years old,” Hainey says. Bob Hainey might not have wanted his son to know what he was up to that morning, but the reporter in the boy won out. “This is my story,” he says, “as well as his.”