Nonfiction: Hollywood Park by Mikel Jollett

Around this same time of the year in 2009, I was steadily getting more and more excited for the Austin City Limits Music Festival. This is before the festival was split up over two weekends, and also before I decided that the large crowds, long lines, and incredible heat were way too much for me to take. One of the bands that I had researched and was ready to see was The Airborne Toxic Event, an indie rock band that was catching people's attention with their song Sometime Around Midnight. When I first looked into today's book, Hollywood Park by Mikel Jollett, I had no idea the author was the same man whose vocals make Sometime Around Midnight such a haunting song. And it turns out the man can write a haunting memoir too.

Genre, Themes, History: Jollett's story begins in the late 1970s in the Synanon Cult where he spent his early childhood. What started out as a commune quickly turned into something hostile and dangerous, where the married couples were forced to divorce, and the children were taken from their parents and raised in the "school" as "children of the universe." But even after Jollett's mother rescues him and his older brother Tony, it becomes clear that things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. Jollett carefully and thoroughly chronicles a life of feeling cursed to fail, and then feeling guilty during the times when things go right. With a needy and manipulative mother on one side, and a no longer heroin-addicted father who ultimately wants his boys to grow up to be kind and helpful human beings on the other, Jollett grows up knowing the script he is supposed to follow, and fighting the path he feels compelled to take. Neither one seems right, but they are both what he knows. He will eventually learn the name for what he endured as a child in his mother's house, and when he finally pursues music, opens up, and gets help, that is when a new direction becomes clear.  

My Verdict: I adore this book. I was not sure how this was going to go, especially given my aversion to stories that deal with cults. It helps that Jollett leaves the cult when he is very young, but even so, the effects of what went on there will last a lifetime. The story itself is full of heartbreaking and harsh scenes: countless conversations where his mom tells him how he feels and will not acknowledge the truth; interactions with people with addictions they are struggling to control; and even the later struggle when Jollett realizes he does not have the follow the path of his parents, but knowing that will create a sort of divide between him and his father. What will get the reader through the tough parts is the lyrical writing that is both honest and soothing, a balance that is difficult to strike, especially in memoirs full of difficult scenes. I cannot recommend this book enough.

Favorite Moment: When Mikel's dad teaches him how to fight so he can defend himself against a bully from school.

Favorite Quotes: "It seemed like writers have the most important job in the world, to make books, to create a connection, a kind of telepathy between two minds in which one can inhabit the other."

After reading Black Boy by Richard Wright for school - "I can't help but be inspired, to think if he can face the horrors he had to face, I can at least stay up late studying...I admire him and I wish so much we could be friends, that his locker was near mine and we could have lunch together."

Recommended Reading: The Sound of Gravel by Ruth Wariner chronicles the writer's young life when her family was part of a cult in Mexico.