Hunter S Thompson was known for lots of things: the frenetic pace of his writing, his fondness for guns, smoking with a clear plastic filter known as a TarGard. And, of course, taking drugs and drinking alcohol at a rate rivaled only by the likes of Keith Richards. It is not necessarily what one would want in a father, but Juan Thompson didn’t have much of a choice. He was simply born to it.

After his father killed himself in 2005, Thompson felt that all the portraits of his father as a manic partier were missing something. “So much of [the media coverage] really focused on this crazy gonzo journalist,” Thompson said in a phone interview last week after the release of Stories I Tell Myself: Growing Up With Hunter S Thompson. “I felt this compulsion to point out that there was this other dimension to him, as a person and as a writer.”

Juan Thompson. Photograph: Supplied

His resulting memoir nonetheless gives the impression that the good man in Hunter S Thompson was sometimes hard to find. There were long, late-at-night arguments that he, as a child, would try to mediate. Mostly, he writes in the book, he ended up taking his mother, Sandy’s, side. “[My father] didn’t care what she was trying to say, he cared about breaking her,” he said. In the book, Thompson recalls his father’s “deliberate distortions and carefully chosen words that would inflict maximum hurt”.

There were also certain cruel words for his son. Hunter Thompson often cursed at Juan, calling him a “waterhead bastard”. He frequently threatened him with beatings, although they never actually came to pass. And Thompson makes clear that once he became an adult, his father struggled to understand him, even speculating in a note on one of Thompson’s letters from college that he thought his son was gay. “Jesus,” continued the note, “What hath Sandy wrought?”

Gradually, Thompson found he could only survive his father’s rages and chaos by distancing himself from it. Key to his transformation was the realization that “whatever my father’s greater virtues were as a writer, a warrior, and a wise man – in his daily life he was a basket case, or in the vocabulary of the time: dysfunctional”. Gradually, father and son reconciled, and managed to build a relationship, in part, Thompson recalled, because he stopped expecting his father to be someone he was not.

Their relationship evolved into something where each was able to surprise the other with small acts of kindness: Juan gave a speech in 1996 telling his father that he loved him and calling his work “magic”, Hunter with his habit of screening the speech proudly for friends and telling his son, gruffly, “Don’t kid yourself about the magic.”

Thompson recorded all this turbulence in simple prose quite unlike his father’s. “Imitations of Hunter’s writing are always bad,” he said. “It never works.” (Take note, Sean Penn.)

Now 51, Juan Thompson lives in Denver, Colorado, with his wife and son. He works for a health insurance company as an IT project manager. “It looks very normal,” he said, of his life. “In lots of respects, it is very normal. It’s a life that my dad was constitutionally unable to live. He just couldn’t do it.”

It took Juan Thompson nine years to write his book. He struggled to portray his father accurately, without giving in to sentiment. At first he could only draft a book that lionized his father. “But what was really clear to me was that Hunter would want me to be really honest,” he said. “If I were to whitewash things and try to portray him as someone he wasn’t, he’d be really upset about that.”

“It was really important to me that people understood that this was absolutely not a story about my rotten dad and the terrible things he did,” Thompson also said. “I don’t think there’s anything really special [in my story] in that aspect. Probably lots and lots of fathers and sons go through the same kind of process, it’s just their dads aren’t famous.”

If I were to whitewash things and try to portray him as someone he wasn’t, he’d be really upset about that Juan Thompson

Among the details he included in his book is one, though, that he thinks Thompson might have been embarrassed by. Towards the end of Thompson’s life he records his father as suffering from a variety of ailments, one of which left him incontinent. Some friends of his father’s were upset about this, he told me, and he understood why. He would never have written about that had his father still been alive, Thompson said. “But in the book, it really felt important to talk about that because it really was … I believe it was one of the factors in his decision to take his life, that his body was falling apart.”

The last chapter of the book recounts the particulars of the suicide and Thompson’s subsequent memorial, when his ashes were fired into the sky by a cannon. The contraption cost thousands of dollars, which Johnny Depp paid for, and was followed, appropriately, with a long and raucous party.

Thompson is, of course, well aware that a lot of people adored his father precisely because they found his lifestyle liberating.

“People talk about his courage to live life on his terms and ignore social norms,” Thompson said. “I think that’s something that people really react to, that sense of freedom that he so symbolized.” For him, of course, Hunter S Thompson was something else, altogether.