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60
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
84/100Critics
37/100Scholars
Author:
Mikel Jollett
Publisher:
Celadon Books
Date:
May 26, 2020
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.
What The Reviewers Say
...a memoir that’s dangerous, immediate and lyrical from the jump.
In his frank and poignant first book, Jollett tries to capture the path to discovering the forces that shaped him. He writes from the perspective of a child and adolescent who slowly grows aware of his circumstances. Jollett has an innate sensitivity and eye for detail. You sense that any novel he’d write would be a good one, a Denis Johnson-esque tale rife with drifters and drugs and couples hitting the skids.
Notably, [Jollet's] earliest years were spent at Synanon, a drug rehabilitation program that devolved into a notoriously violent cult. As a result, the earliest parts of his memoir contain chilling anecdotes about the repressive, bizarre, and dehumanizing experience of life there. What narratively works is that Jollett, being only a small child at the time, didn't know a world outside Synanon — so the scenes of cult life have a sheen of innocence to them, lending a real eeriness.
While his first book is being touted as a memoir about growing up in the Synanon cult, Jollett, frontman for the band Airborne Toxic Event, actually writes much more about his life after escaping it.
