Mikel Jollett, frontman for Airborne Toxic Event, mines the cratered landscape of trauma in Hollywood Park, a raw, revealing, expansive account of a life unmoored.
Born into the infamous Synanon cult, Jollett spent his first few years essentially an orphan. His parents joined in part to treat his father's heroin addiction--but the group devolved into disorder and tyranny. Jollett's parents split up while there and his mother arranged her escape with her two young sons. Throughout, Jollett is adept and flexible with language, writing in present tense. There is much thoughtful reflection and understanding in Jollett's approach, in particular toward his mother's mental illness. In first grade, an aptitude test suggests he skip to third or fourth, but his mother decides it's better if he remains with kids his age. As a result, school bores him and he's a perpetual misfit. He is happiest during summers, which he spends in Southern California with his father, and Jollett eventually moves in permanently with his dad. Later, he receives a scholarship to Stanford University.
The evolution of Jollett's narrative voice in Hollywood Park mirrors the evolution of his ways of coping with his upbringing. It's childlike in the beginning, growing more contemplative, measured and empathetic by the end, even as he's still trying to understand his place in the world. Now a father himself, he ponders big questions: What does it mean to be a man? A son? A brother? A father?
His memoir is exquisitely beautiful and exquisitely painful; it lingers in the mind like a melody. --Katie Weed