From PEN/Hemingway award winner Brando Skyhorse comes this stunning, heartfelt memoir in the vein of The Glass Castle or The Tender Bar, 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.
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“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, Pulitzer Prize finalist