Take This Man (Skyhorse)

Take This Man:  A Memoir
Brando Skyhorse, 2014
Simon & Schuster
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781439170878


Summary
The true story of a boy’s turbulent childhood growing up with 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 Mexican father. His mother, Maria, dreaming of a more exciting life, saw no reason for her son to live his life as a Mexican just because he started out as one. The life of “Brando Skyhorse,” the American Indian 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. There Brando and his mother live with his acerbic grandmother and a rotating cast of surrogate fathers. It will be over thirty years before Brando begins to untangle the truth of his own past, when a surprise discovery online leads him to his biological father at last.

From an acclaimed, prize-winning novelist celebrated for his “indelible storytelling” (O, The Oprah Magazine), this extraordinary literary memoir captures a son’s single-minded search for a father wherever he can find one, and is destined to become a classic. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1973-74
• Where—Los Angeles (Echo Park), California, USA
• Education—B.A., Stanford University; M.F.A., University of
   California, Irvine
• Awards—PEN/Hemingway Award; Sue Kaufman Prize (American
   Academy of Arts and Letters)
• Currently—lives in Jersey City, New Jersey


Brando Skyhorse grew up in the 1970s and '80s mostly with Vietnamese and Mexican immigrants the Echo Park, section of Los Angeles, California. He channeled those memories into his 2010 novel, The Madonnas of Echo Park.

Skyhorse says he always felt like an outsider in the neighborhood.

I was definitely the nerdy kid with the book bag, with the glasses and the whole thing. I didn't hang out with gangs, or anything. I don't even think I even considered it an option because I wasn't cool enough for that. I wasn't even worthy enough to be hassled by them. I was just totally invisible.

When Skyhorse was three, his father left, and he had a revolving door of stepfathers, never realizing till much older that most of what his mother told him about himself was simply made up, including his name. His mother was so involved in the American Indian movement of the 1970s that she identified herself as Native American even though she was Mexican American.

Corresponding with an American Indian man jailed for armed robbery, she took his last name, Skyhorse, as her own and her son's. She then changed her first name to "Running Deer" and her son's to "Brando" in honor of Marlon Brando's 1970s involvement in Native American activities.

Skyhorse graduated from Stanford University and received his M.F.A. from the writers' program from the University of California at Irvine's writing program. He worked in publishing for ten years as an editor and writer of both fiction and non-fiction.

His first novel, The Madonnas of Echo Park, ws released in 2010. The novel follows the intersections of its characters and cultures in Los Angeles, giving voice to the Echo Park neighborhood with an astonishing—and unforgettable—lyrical power. The book received the 2011 PEN/Hemingway award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

His second book, Take This Man, a memoir, recounts his childhood years with his mother and her five husbands. It came out in 2014.

Skyhorse currently lives in Jersey City, New Jersey. He has been appointed the 2014 Jenny McKean Moore Writer-In-Washington at George Washington University. (Author bio compiled with information from the publisher and other online sources.)

Book Reviews
This isn’t a predictable tale of irresponsible parenting.... For most of the book, the subject seems to be a fatherless young man on the proverbial quest for identity.... Then Skyhorse pulls a neat switch.... Thirty years later, Skyhorse does indeed track down the biological father who abandoned him, but in the intervening years he understands that the absent Father is unrecoverable.... So this memoir isn’t about absence. It’s about presence. Skyhorse’s subject isn’t what he’ll never have. It’s what he’ll always have, what he can’t get rid of.
Rhoda Janzen - New York Times Book Review


(Starred review.) [A] vivid and idiosyncratic family memoir .... Skyhorse's upbringing has had lasting effects on his romantic relationships and mental health, but he manages to write about his experiences and those who shaped them with grace. 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


[A]n account of [Skyhorse's] own Los Angeles childhood in the Echo Park neighborhood in a family so dysfunctional it seems to be fictional.... At 33, he finally searches for [his father] 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
Booklist


(Starred review.) [A] wickedly compelling account of a dysfunctional childhood growing up "a full blooded American Indian brave" with five different fathers.... As he gathered up the shards of his life...Skyhorse realized the one truth that his storytelling mother and grandmother had known instinctively: that "stories [could] help you survive"…. By turns funny and wrenching, the narrative is an unforgettable tour de force of memory, love and imagination.
Kirkus Reviews

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