Hollywood Park explores a man's journey from childhood to adulthood, having escaped from the Synanon cult in California in the 1970s. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. What happened thereafter (without giving away too many spoilers) was almost worse. An abusive parent, poverty, an a strong desire to forget the neglect that embodied Synanon's "school," essentially a forced-orphanage where children are abandoned. I so appreciated Jollett's vulnerability, showing the moments where he slowly realized his experience put him in the category of "Other." So often when children experience trauma (and Jollett experienced many), that comparison to others can happen the rest of your life.
I find that fiction had a brief love affair with cult-recovery stories, specifically I'm thinking about Arcadia and The Girls (I loved the former, disliked the latter). Jollett's memoir shows the nuance of cult survivorship (among other traumas). Organized groups of people hoping to find good can quickly find themselves forgetting reality and accepting violence and coldness as appropriate for child development. Some recover from this, some don't.
While I certainly don't deduct any stars/points for this, I was so disappointed that the piece about Jollett's musical career was so rushed. We get so much rich detail about his life and cult-recovery experience, only for the music piece to be so brief. As someone who enjoys The Airborne Toxic Event, I had hoped for more details in these stories. He wrote about how his childhood experiences shaped his romantic relationship....but what about his professional ones? Who knows, maybe that'll be his next book.
I find that fiction had a brief love affair with cult-recovery stories, specifically I'm thinking about Arcadia and The Girls (I loved the former, disliked the latter). Jollett's memoir shows the nuance of cult survivorship (among other traumas). Organized groups of people hoping to find good can quickly find themselves forgetting reality and accepting violence and coldness as appropriate for child development. Some recover from this, some don't.
While I certainly don't deduct any stars/points for this, I was so disappointed that the piece about Jollett's musical career was so rushed. We get so much rich detail about his life and cult-recovery experience, only for the music piece to be so brief. As someone who enjoys The Airborne Toxic Event, I had hoped for more details in these stories. He wrote about how his childhood experiences shaped his romantic relationship....but what about his professional ones? Who knows, maybe that'll be his next book.