Hollywood Park by Mikel Jollett Review

 Title: Hollywood Park 

Author: Mikel Jollett 

Age Group: Adult 

Genre: Memoir 

Series: Standalone 

Star Rating: 5 out of 5 Stars 

I was sent a copy of this book by the publisher, Celadon Books, through the Goodreads First Reads program—thank you so much to the publisher and author, as well as Goodreads! 

I’ve had Hollywood Park for a while now, and I was in the mood for some nonfiction after I was finished reading The God Game, What Happened to Goodbye, and The Hunting Party. This book, at times, was extremely hard to get through; I was glad I was reading other books just to give me a lift. But honestly, this book may be one of the best I’ve ever read. Raw, emotional, and unflinchingly honest, Hollywood Park takes you through an early childhood spent on the run from a notorious, awful cult, led by a flighty, selfish, and inconsiderate mother, a teenage boy in search of love and meaning and trying to find it through hard drugs, partying, and setting things ablaze, all the way up to adulthood, where the damage that his family caused finally catches up to him. This book made me laugh, cry, and scream, often more than once. Memoirs usually put me off; sometimes I can tell when an author is lying, but this wasn’t the case at all with Hollywood Park. Rich with anguish in painstaking detail, I was swept away by Jollett’s frank, honest voice, all the way to the end, to his happy ending. I loved it, even while it brought up ghosts and demons of my own past and upbringing. Though it was painful and very emotional, neither do I regret reading it, because this story, told with a writer’s heart and soul, needed to be told. 

Mikel Jollett knows his purpose: to take care of his ailing, depressed mother and stay out of his brother Tony’s way. Never mind that Mikel himself is a young child who was taken from his mother at just six months, and that he has his own damages. He is the little man of the house, forced against his will to become an adult years early. In a boyhood fraught with separation, anguish, addiction, and the desperate need to be loved, Mikel finds himself, for the first time, in school, escaping into books and homework. As a runner, he hopes to go to college and leave his broken family behind. With a writer’s heart and honest, unflinching accounts of a brutal and cold childhood, Hollywood Park grabbed me by the neck and didn’t let go until long after the last page; by the end, I was sobbing like a child. I’m just happy that Mikel Jollett, despite all the pain he suffered, finally found a happy ending. Easily one of the best memoirs I’ve ever read—and I will definitely be listening to music from The Toxic Airborne Event! The bottom line: Rich with honest detail and fraught with pain, I loved Hollywood Park, even as it broke my heart! Next on deck: The Surface Breaks by Louise O’Neill!