Hollywood Park

2020, Celadon Books

Reading-wise, it’s been a bit of a dry spell recently. Despite a fairly steady stream of recommendations from well-read friends and family whose taste generally dovetails with my own, I’ve abandoned more books than I’ve finished reading during the past few months.

That said, I did recently race through Hollywood Park, an unexpectedly compelling memoir by Mikel  Jollett, who, along with his older brother, started life in the California cult Synanon. What happens to them and their parents in the aftermath, forms the thrust of this story.

I’ll admit that the book’s premise, what it’s like to escape from a cult, did not initially grab me, but with only Hollywood Park for company during my lunch break at my new school, I grew more and more attached to the outcome as I plunged forward in Jollett’s story, which follows the California and Oregon odyssey of him and his brother, as they try to stay afloat in the wake of a mother with a tenuous grasp on her maternal duties.

There are men who populate the boys’ mother’s life— her father, a Dutchman with an alcoholic wife, a couple of ersatz husbands, and of course, the boys themselves. The protagonist, Mikel, tries to escape his life’s trauma largely through bike riding, music, and running. He and his older brother, because they were initially reared in a cult where the children were removed from the parents, have little concept of family and a skewed sense of safety, yet they still manage to get fed, clothed, and schooled, although tenuously at times.

The story’s resolution caught me by surprise. As a bit of an old salt when it comes to books, I like to think that I can see where a story is going, but Jollett unfolds this tale in such a way as to preclude that. If nothing else, that alone is a laudable feat, but there is more than that to Hollywood Park, whose title refers to the former racetrack located a short distance from LAX.

Hollywood Park is about many things. It’s about brothers; it’s about mothers and sons, sons and fathers, addiction and caretaking. Because too much of the latter would be relentless, it is, of course, ultimately about redemption and the strength of family ties. 

It’s worth a read.

The dedication in Hollywood Park reads, To Poppy and Lou. When I finished the book, I had to think for a moment. I could guess about the former, but it took me a second to determine who Lou was.

I think you can figure it out.