...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.

A painstaking emotional accounting of a tortured youth ultimately redeemed through music, therapy, and love.

...[an] arresting debut memoir.