So I was halfway through Mikel Jollett's stunning memoir, Hollywood Park and thought I must have the wrong author. I thought Mikel Jollett went to Stanford. The author of this book had every conceivable disadvantage in his early life including an escape from a notorious cult, a drug addicted, imprisoned father and a mother that suffered such severe bouts of "deep Russian" (the author's heart breaking perception as a child of mental illness) that at best she was an absent parent. By the time he and his brother were in middle school, he and his brother were abusing alcohol and drugs and marginally attending school.
Well it turns out Mikel Jollett did wind up at Stanford. There he was a freshman phenom runner on the track team, just one of many of his extraordinary talents. Oh yeah and the is the frontman for the Airborne Toxic Event, for which he writes the songs and lyrics. This is simply one of the best turn around stories that I have ever read.
Mikel Jollett's music is very good, but I listened to it with a different ear after reading this book. His real genius is his writing, whether its lyrics or literature. Here's hoping he keeps writing.
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From the Publisher
How clear are your memories from childhood?
Mikel Jollett: I mostly grew up in the wreckage of Synanon, since we left when I was so young. It came to me like a puzzle I had to put together, almost like separate realities with different rules: Here are the Rules According to Synanon (you have no parents, you are a new type of human who doesn’t need them, nothing is yours), here are the Rules in the Great Big World (no one talks to each other, you’re very poor, your mother is very sad). It took my brother and me a long, long time to piece together the reality that a functional adult might have about the situation, that we’d escaped a cult that had once done good things for addicts (including our father), that our mother was severely depressed, and that these experiences were unique in some ways and quite common in others.
Hollywood Park, The Album
In conjunction with Mikel Jollett's memoir, The Airborne Toxic Event has released an album by the same name. Hollywood Park is a 12-song concept record that acts as a soundtrack to the book. Available from Amazon Music.
About the author
A Memoir That Holds Your Attention like a Contemporary Thriller
This memoir from debut author combines all the raw and heartbreaking abuse of 1995's shocking book 'A Child Called It' with 2018's best selling 'Educated: A Memoir.' At times it is difficult to not put the book aside as one reels at the abuse from the ex-con, heroin addict father. (The type of reading break I occasionally had to take years ago when reading 'The Lovely Bones'.) Interestingly, the first page of my ARC of HOLLYWOOD PARK is a letter from the president and publisher of Celadon Books saying that he doesn't usually select memoirs because there are so many. Likewise, I am not necessarily drawn to memoirs unless I am really interested in the author as a person; I knew nothing about author Mikel Jollett ahead of time, but the description of his life sounded more like a novel than a memoir. My hunch was not wrong. Novel fan or memoir fan - Jollett's book will appeal to either. When the book opens, the narration begins with Jollett as a young child - at least chronologically, because as the very first sentence eerily states: "We were never young." There was too much fear, too much insecurity, too little food, too little emotional support - no child could relax and be young in those circumstances. As Mikel grows older, he must be tough to survive, but there is always that innocent child within him that wishes things could be different. A classic example is later in the book when he tells his dad that he is really scared and concerned about the mean guy who continually threatens to kill him. Dad's advice is simply to tell Mikel (a thin, 5'7" teen) to kick the ass of the other kid. Oh, and don't fight fair. No spoiler alerts needed. You have to read the book to get Dad's ex-con-style advice. Throughout the book there are interesting anecdotes about Mikel's life, such as the walls of the little California bungalow rattling from the jet engines of the newest, biggest airplane, the 747. You might find the book even more interesting after a little background reading about Synanon, a supposed self-help drug rehabiltation program which continued to change into something increasingly strange and dangerous, under the guise of being a church.Needless to say, most of the time this memoir is not about light hearted memories so saying that this memoir is about overcoming obstacles is the literary understatement of the year. I was fortunate to receive an ARC of this from Celadon Books and this is my honest opinion.
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on September 29, 2020
- Reviewed in the United States on March 26, 2022
- Reviewed in the United States on July 29, 2020
Top reviews from other countries
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Ismael Chan ChávezReviewed in Mexico on January 7, 2021
Un libro maravilloso
Había estado esperando poder pedir este libro el año pasado. Sigo a The Airborne Toxic Event y al enterarme del nuevo álbum y de la memoria de Mikel Jollet no podía esperar.Ismael Chan ChávezUn libro maravilloso
Reviewed in Mexico on January 7, 2021
Tuve que esperar unos meses porque no me encontraba en mi ciudad y hubiera sido difícil pedir algo por la pandemia.
Aunque está en inglés, es un libro maravilloso. Si eres fan de la banda seguro que lo amarás, aunque debes tener un buen nivel de inglés.
El producto llegó en el tiempo establecido, incluso creo que antes. Además bien cuidado. Estoy feliz.
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