Hollywood Park
Book Feature - Hollywood Park by Mikel Jollett
HBL Note: For fans of The Vow on HBO, I present to you Hollywood Park by Mikel Jollett. I don’t know about you, but I am fascinated with cults and how they recruit and maintain membership. Most recently, I’ve been obsessed with The Vow but I also got hooked on Leah Remini’s series on Scientology (she also wrote a great memoir called Troublemaker) and Wild Wild Country. Mikel Jollett was born into one of the most infamous cults, Church of Synanon. Scroll down to read more about his story.
Book Feature - Hollywood Park by Mikel Jollett
Book Feature - Hollywood Park by Mikel Jollett
From the publisher:
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.
Book Feature - Hollywood Park by Mikel Jollett
