Pops: Learning to Be a Son and a Father

by Craig Melvin

Overview

A “deeply personal, heartwarming” exploration of fatherhood, addiction, and resiliency from the award–winning news anchor of NBC’s Today show (Shondaland).

Growing up in Columbia, South Carolina, Craig Melvin had a fraught relationship with his father. A hard-drinking man who worked the graveyard shift at a postal facility, Lawrence Melvin was a distant parent. Craig found ways of connecting with his father through sports and tinkering with his beloved 1973 Pontiac LeMans. But as Lawrence’s drinking spiraled out of control, their bond was stretched to the breaking point.

Fortunately, Craig had a loving, fiercely protective mother who held the family together. He also had a series of surrogate father figures in his life—uncles, teachers, workplace mentors—who by their examples helped him figure out the kind of person and father he wanted to be. Pops is the story of all these men, and of the inspiring fathers Craig has met reporting his “Dads Got This Series” on the Today show. 

For Craig, this book is an opportunity to better understand his father; to interrogate his family’s legacy of addiction and despair as well as transformation and redemption; and to explore the challenges facing all dads—including Craig himself, a father of two young children.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780063072015
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	11/21/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	215
File size:	15 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Craig Melvin is the news anchor of NBC News’ Today show, a co-host of 3rd Hour Today, an anchor on MSNBC Reports, and a host of Dateline NBC. Before joining Today, he was a national correspondent, and before that he was an anchor on NBC’s affiliate in Washington, D.C. He has interviewed presidents, ambassadors, and celebrities, but most enjoys profiling ordinary Americans who have accomplished the extraordinary. He’s also covered a wide variety of breaking news events during his career, including several inaugurations, national political conventions, and too many mass shootings, including in Charleston and Sandy Hook. Melvin has also taken part in NBC Sports’ coverage of numerous major events, including two Olympic Games and six Super Bowls. He graduated from Wofford College, in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where he now serves on the board of trustees. He also serves on the Colorectal Cancer Alliance Board of Directors. He lives in the New York City area with his family.

Table of Contents

Introduction Being There 1

Chapter 1 Where I'm Coming From 11

Chapter 2 Dad and Mom and Me 41

Chapter 3 Role Models, Mentors, and the Ghost 67

Chapter 4 College, Climbing the Ladder, and Love 93

Chapter 5 Dads (Including Occasionally Me) Got This 119

Chapter 6 Brothers 151

Chapter 7 "Who is this Guy?" 171

Chapter 8 "I'm Here" 191

Acknowledgments 197

Editorial Reviews

An emotionally and atmospherically deep celebration of a family that has stuck together through thin and thinner.” — Kirkus Reviews

“[A] celebration of fatherhood…deeply personal, heartwarming.” — Shondaland

From the Publisher

[A] celebration of fatherhood…deeply personal, heartwarming.

Shondaland

01/01/2021

Host of the popular advice column "¡Hola Papi!" on Substack, Brammer offers a memoir-in-essays, tracking what it's like to grow up as a queer, mixed-race Chicano kid in America's heartlands (75,000-copy first printing). In The Profession, originally scheduled for fall 2020 and written with Turnaround coauthor Knobler, Bratton tracks a career that led to his being police commissioner in New York City. Burns proclaims Where You Are Is Not Who You Are, sharing where she's been and what she's learned as the first Black female CEO of a Fortune 500 company (75,000-copy first printing). Former teen model Diamond (Naked Rome) reveals a childhood both wacky and cliff-hanging in Nowhere Girl; on the run with an outlaw family, she lived in more than a dozen countries, on five continents, under six assumed identities, by age nine (50,000-copy first printing). Twitter-famous Henderson offers The Ugly Cry to tell us about being raised Black in a mostly white community by tough grandparents after her mother abandoned her. Today show news anchor Melvin uses Pops to explore issues of race and fatherhood while recalling his own dad (100,000-copy first printing). Founder of Chicago's Dreamcatcher Foundation, which assists young people in disadvantaged areas, Myers-Powell recalls a childhood fractured by her mother's death and a life of pimps and parties before finally Leaving Breezy Street (75,000-copy first printing). Growing up scary smart if poor and emotionally unsupported, James Edward Plummer renamed himself Hakeem Muata Oluseyi to honor his African heritage and now leads A Quantum Life as a NASA physicist. In House of Sticks, Tran recalls leaving Vietnam as a toddler in 1993 and growing up in Queens, helping her mom as a manicurist and eventually graduating from Columbia (100,000-copy first printing). In As a Woman, Williams, a celebrated speaker on gender equity and LGTBQ+ issues, describes the decision to transition from male to female as a 60-year-old husband, father, and pastor (60,000-copy first printing).

Library Journal

2021-04-28
The Today Show host chronicles his family’s story through dark times and great obstacles.

Melvin looks back at his upbringing in Columbia, South Carolina, during the 1980s and 1990s. Though he focuses on his relationship with his father, many other members of his large family play important supporting roles in the memoir. Melvin is in his early 40s, but he has enough experience and wisdom to be able to see his father through a very different lens than when he was younger, when his father’s absences, sullenness, and emotional distance troubled him. Gradually, he learned that his father was a severe alcoholic—and not just an alcoholic, but addiction prone in general, as when he lost himself to video poker, “the crack cocaine of gambling” (now outlawed in the state), squandering much of his paycheck. Melvin has a canny way of putting readers in his younger shoes, capably demonstrating his confusion and need for approval and how these factors shaped his personality. He worked diligently to avoid his father’s fate and become a self-confident, communicative, empathetic adult. The author also fills in the background of the “soft racism” of Columbia and what it was like for a Black family to move across the river to downtown. Many members of his extended family move in and out of the narrative, each bringing their own quirks, strengths, and weaknesses. But it all comes back to his Pops, and Melvin won’t settle for a simple answer: “hindered by his own family history, his own parents’ shortcomings and dearth of resources, his lack of a good role model…the systematic and overt racism he faced…the legacy of alcoholism—and likely an undiagnosed underlying depression.” As the author grappled with his family’s legacy, he devised his own philosophy about child rearing: “You want to make their path as smooth as possible, but without spoiling them rotten.”

An emotionally and atmospherically deep celebration of a family that has stuck together through thin and thinner.

Kirkus Reviews