Hollywood Park by Mikel Jollett

I did not try to get a galley, I did not try to win this memoir, I did not think it would interest me. At publication, it garnered much praise. Finally, I listened to a clip of the audiobook and immediately purchased it.

Wow. What a fool I was. No, wait--I am SO GLAD that I first encountered Hollywood Park as an audiobook, read by the author Mikel Jollett. I could not stop listening to it. It was mesmerizing.

Jollett so beautifully reconstructs his childhood experience of a baffling world, the angst of growing up with a mentally ill mother, the joy of a loving father, the twisting and evolving relationship with a brother also struggling with a dysfunctional childhood.

There is the beauty of the writing, the depth of understanding, the struggle with one's brokenness, the heartbreaking story turning into an anthem of personal growth.

Artists turn their pain into that which others can experience and know they are not alone.

Hollywood Park
by Mikel Jollett
Macmillian Audio
ISBN1250754593 (ISBN13: 9781250754592)

from the publisher

HOLLYWOOD PARK is a remarkable memoir of a tumultuous life. Mikel Jollett was born into one of the country’s most infamous cults, and subjected to a childhood filled with poverty, addiction, and emotional abuse. Yet, ultimately, his is a story of fierce love and family loyalty told in a raw, poetic voice that signals the emergence of a uniquely gifted writer.

We were never young. We were just too afraid of ourselves. No one told us who we were or what we were or where all our parents went. They would arrive like ghosts, visiting us for a morning, an afternoon. They would sit with us or walk around the grounds, to laugh or cry or toss us in the air while we screamed. Then they’d disappear again, for weeks, for months, for years, leaving us alone with our memories and dreams, our questions and confusion. …

So begins Hollywood Park, Mikel Jollett’s remarkable memoir. 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.” After spending years in what was essentially an orphanage, Mikel escaped the cult one morning with his mother and older brother. 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.