Take This Man: A Memoir, by Brando Skyhorse
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Take This Man: A Memoir, by Brando Skyhorse
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Named one of Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Books of 2014 One of NBC News’s 10 Best Latino Books of 2014 “A West Coast version of Augusten Burroughs’s Running With Scissors...A funny, shocking, generous-hearted book” (Entertainment Weekly) about a boy, his five stepfathers, and the mother who was determined to give her son everything but the truth.When he was three years old, Brando Kelly Ulloa was abandoned by his immigrant father. His mother, Maria, dreaming of a more exciting life, saw no reason for her son to live as a Mexican American just because he was born one. With the help of Maria’s ruthless imagination and a hastily penned jailhouse correspondence, the life of “Brando Skyhorse,” the Native American son of an incarcerated political activist, was about to begin. Through a series of letters to Paul Skyhorse Johnson, a stranger in prison for armed robbery, Maria reinvents herself and her young son as American Indians in the colorful Mexican-American neighborhood of Echo Park, California, where Brando and his mother live with his acerbic grandmother and a rotating cast of surrogate fathers. It will be thirty years before Brando begins to untangle the truth, when a surprise discovery leads him to his biological father at last. From this PEN/Hemingway Award–winning novelist comes an extraordinary literary memoir capturing a mother-son story unlike any other and a boy’s single-minded search for a father, wherever he can find one.
Take This Man: A Memoir, by Brando Skyhorse- Amazon Sales Rank: #187545 in Books
- Brand: Skyhorse, Brando
- Published on: 2015-06-23
- Released on: 2015-06-23
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.37" h x .80" w x 5.50" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 272 pages
Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, June 2014: Brando Skyhorse channeled the Mexican-American voices of his LA childhood in his PEN/Hemingway award-winning novel The Madonnas of Echo Park. But growing up there, he felt distinctly at the fringes, the outsider son of a Native American chief who’d been imprisoned when a political action turned violent. His mother, living by the caveat “at least it’s never boring,” took up with a string of (sometimes overlapping) stepfathers, each presented as his new dad. But at 30, he discovered this real father was a Mexican who’d disappeared when Brando was three--driven off by his erratic mother, who took that opportunity to dramatically revise their history. In a voice rich with grit and grace, Take This Man tells a taut, absorbing story of searching for a father, reconciling an invented identity with some version of truth, and struggling to understand a mother whose grand fabrications and violent outbursts made his early life so electrifying and recklessly chaotic. He doesn’t sugarcoat, and against such rough terrain, his compassion and humor are astonishing. With this book, Skyhorse claims his place among the best modern memoirists. --Mari Malcolm
From Booklist Skyhorse follows The Madonnas of Echo Park (2010) with an account of his own Los Angeles childhood in the Echo Park neighborhood in a family so dysfunctional it seems to be fictional. His mother, Maria, and father, Candido, are Mexican. Candido leaves when Brando is three, driven away by volatile and unstable Maria. She then adopts a Native American persona, changing her name to Running Deer, and giving Brando the last name Skyhorse, the name of a man on trial in L.A. Over the next 15 years, Brando has five different “fathers,” each of whom leaves. He earns a scholarship to Stanford, where he maintains the charade of being Native American. Harassed by his psychotic mother with multiple daily and nightly phone calls, he nearly flunks out. Instead, he graduates and completes the writing program at the University of California, Irvine. At 33, he finally searches for Candido and gradually becomes part of a new, blessedly normal family. A harrowing, compulsively readable story of one man’s remarkable search for identity. --Deborah Donovan
Review “Hilarious and deeply moving…This is a wild read that will move you to tears and laughter simultaneously.” (NBC News)“A searingly funny and fearless book….written with such velocity and stark recollection that it feels as if the author is writing to save his life.... Take This Man should be on the same shelf with Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life, or maybe it should occupy an off-tilt, splintered shelf of its own....[It] would make a terrific movie, if that weren’t an undignified thing to say about such a fine literary work. I say this because Skyhorse’s writing has such vivid immediacy, beautifully drawn scenes and cameo appearances by all sorts of unusual, memorable characters.... [A] tour-de-force.” (The Washington Post)“Skyhorse has a fascinating story to tell, and he tells it with the skill and sway of a novelist.... It's a story that's almost too big to be true. Yet it reveals so much that's universal, about human longing and belonging, about the endless capacity we have to betray and rescue ourselves and the people we love.” (San Francisco Chronicle)“Skyhorse's memoir is a West Coast version of Augusten Burroughs'Running With Scissors... [A] funny, shocking, generous-hearted book.” (Entertainment Weekly)“Skyhorse is a thoughtful, lyrical writer, and his memoir is filled with epigrammatic observations that keep his story from becoming a mere catalog of misery.” (Boston Globe)“Top this: Skyhorse grew up poor in a claustrophobic 1980s Echo Park home with a Chicana mother who pretended they were Native American, a bisexual grandmother who pretended she was straight, and five no-account stepfathers who each got out when the getting was no longer good... Skyhorse really is a star, transcending a wack-ball family and a then-sketchy neighborhood to become a gifted writer... Skyhorse's last page works so well, it gilds the rest of the book in a sweet, retroactive glow. Sometimes a book catches you in a weak moment, so I went back to read the scene a few weeks later, just to make sure. Knowing what was coming made it only better.” (Los Angeles Times)"A writer on the rise.... this [is a] gripping memoir." (Details)“Take This Man is earnest and searching, genuinely interested in exploring the complex arrangement that we call family.... [with] exquisite prose, but also a mature acknowledgment of the complex nature of memory, longing, love, and disappointment.” (The Los Angeles Review of Books)“[A] moving and poignant search for identity under impossible circumstances... I sobbed through the final section. Part of that power comes from Skyhorse’s understanding of narrative, his novelist’s eye... One ends Take This Man rooting for Skyhorse, hoping that he can take all these stories and turn them into something worthwhile. This book is certainly a start.” (Flavorwire)"[A] stunning memoir of emotional dysfunction and hard-won understanding.... Skyhorse has a keen ear for language and for story but his capacity to understand and forgive, to find the humanity in the difficult people around him, should elevate his work to a literary classic." (Shelf Awareness)"A harrowing, compulsively readable story of one man’s remarkable search for identity." (Booklist)"A wickedly compelling account of a dysfunctional childhood. By turns funny and wrenching, the narrative is an unforgettable tour de force of memory, love and imagination." (Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review))“By turns darkly comical and moving, this powerful memoir of a family in flux will stick with readers well after they’ve put it down.” (Publishers Weekly (Starred Review))"A beautiful, compassionate, but also hilarious and hair-raising tale of one boy’s life, the lies and truths his mother told, and the damage and the magic she created. Brando Skyhorse is an irresistible writer with an incredible story." (Jeannette Walls, author of The Glass Castle)"Take This Man is as astonishing a memoir as I've ever read. Brando Skyhorse's beautifully-told tale of his truly bizarre childhood and his search for a father moved me in a way that few books have. I will never forget Skyhorse's charismatic mother and grandmother, nor the tortured triangle the three of them formed. I was reminded at times of Geoffrey Wolff's The Duke of Deception, and also of The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls and The Tender Bar by J.R. Moehringer. But I guarantee that this is a family story unlike any you've read before. It deserves to become a classic." (Will Schwalbe, New York Times bestselling author of The End of Your Life Book Club)"Take This Man reaches beyond the bounds of my imagination. We use the word “survivor” with disgracefully casual ease. But this writer truly survived being held hostage, raised by wolves. Brando’s grandmother and mother are terrifying and mesmerizing. Their cruelty to their biographer was audacious, calculated and thrilling to read. Stories molested him and nourished him. And it is with relief that I read in Take This Man flashes of Brando’s bitterness and heat, sane fury directed at the Scheherazades who toyed with him. Whatever else they did to him, when he escaped he knew how to tell a story, and this is one hell of story." (Geoffrey Wolff, author of The Duke of Deception
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25 of 26 people found the following review helpful. Child Endangerment with Racial Complications By Jane E. Applebee This is an heartbreakingly honest autobiography told from the point of view of a young and growing child. Most of the book covers the years up through middle school. Not that Skyhorse was a child when he wrote it, but he has recollected his memories of events and his reactions and feelings about them and set them down without analyzing and interpreting them with his adult understanding. It is as if he is reporting from the scene of his childhood all these years later. And thank goodness he is on this side of time. His childhood was not a comfortable and secure place to be. I found myself wanting to reaching into the book, back in time, and rescue this child.His mother was a piece of work alright, (his grandmother and fathers too) and even though the book may occasionally boggle the reader with incessant craziness, it is, as his mother promises, never boring.I never seem to have enough time to read and find that my attention span for reading is getting shorter - I blame the Internet! - this book, however was a quick read because it was hard to put down. It was hard to put down for two reasons:one, it is a compelling story;two, you don't feel right leaving him where he is, you need to read him to safety somehow....
35 of 39 people found the following review helpful. “I was father rich but family poor” By Paul Allaer In “Take This Man: A Memoir” (2014 publication; 259 pages), author Brando Skyhorse retells his upbringing, which is far from your ‘average’ childhood. From the book’s very first paragraph, we are painted a picture of Brando living with his mom and grandmother in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, with his biological dad having left when Brando was 3 years old, and his mom then starting a series of relationships or marriages, resulting in a string of stepfathers.Several comments: first, the author draws the sobering conclusion that “I was father rich but family poor” and you just cringe a little bit when you read that. Indeed, while of course much of the book retells the author’s mostly strained relationships with these men, the common thread to all of them is the author’s mother, Maria, a (take your pick) delusional/self-absorbed/unconscionable woman who dreams up being American Indian (even though their roots are Mexican), and raises her son accordingly. “She alternated between Maria and Running Deer, but for a woman who dreamed of being an Indian somebody instead of a Mexican nobody, how she introduced herself was an easy choice”. And then there is this observation: “My mother dated three-dimensionally, keeping track of the men she met through her evolving singles ads like a chess master in the park playing five games at once”. Wow.Writing about this now 3+ decades later, the author seemingly is still coming to grips with the long shadows of a pained childhood, in which he desperately lacked a true father figure, even though there were plenty of men around. The author’s razor-sharp recollections from early age on, only reinforce the fact that this has been a heavy burden to bear. This book isn’t necessarily a ‘fun’ read, but I found myself perplexed and mesmerized in a certain way. “Take This Man” is a sobering but insightful book and I would readily recommend it to anyone interested in a thoughtful family memoir.
19 of 21 people found the following review helpful. We probably all have a bit of dysfunction in our families By Janice Sims The question is, will we rise above it, or allow it to negatively affect us? Everyone I personally know who has achieved anything in this life did so after being challenged in some way. Trial by fire. In this memoir about Brando Skyhorse's search for an identity I am reminded of that fact. Although he loved his mother and his grandmother, he was often caught between those two strong-willed women. As he states, his life sometimes seemed perfect; and then he'd experience one of his mother's rages and he would realize his life was actually a nightmare. It's obvious he suffered abuse at his mother's hand, yet he didn't hate her. That's how loyal he was to this mercurial woman. I suppose writing this memoir was cathartic for him. His journey from a boy who just wanted a father to the man who makes a concerted effort to find out why his mother behaved the way she did is an amazing read. At least it was to me because I also have a mother who is 'different'.
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