Maximum Shelf: HOLLYWOOD PARK (2/13/20)

Today’s Shelf Awareness Maximum Shelf pick is Mikel Jollett’s remarkable memoir of a tumultuous life, HOLLYWOOD PARK.

His story opens in an experimental commune in California, which later morphed into the Church of Synanon, one of the country’s most infamous and dangerous cults. Per the leader’s mandate, all children, including Jollett and his older brother, were separated from their parents when they were six months old, and handed over to the cult’s “School.” When Mikel was five, his mother escaped the cult with both of her children. But in many ways, life outside Synanon was even harder and more erratic.

In his raw, poetic and powerful voice, Jollett portrays a childhood filled with abject poverty, trauma, emotional abuse, delinquency and the lure of drugs and alcohol. Raised by a clinically depressed mother, tormented by his angry older brother, subjected to the unpredictability of troubled step-fathers and longing for contact with his father, a former heroin addict and ex-con, Jollett slowly, often painfully, builds a life that leads him to Stanford University and, eventually, to finding his voice as a writer and musician.

HOLLYWOOD PARK is told at first through the limited perspective of a child, and then broadens as Jollett begins to understand the world around him. Although Mikel Jollett’s story is filled with heartbreak, it is ultimately an unforgettable portrayal of love at its fiercest and most loyal.

“His memoir is exquisitely beautiful and exquisitely painful; it lingers in the mind like a melody… He captures the thunderclaps, their rolling echoes, the whole beautiful storm–and makes it sing.”–Shelf Awareness

See the full summary, review, and interview with Mikel Jollett on Shelf-Awareness.com. AND enter to win an ARC!

Download the e-galley from Edelweiss here.