Take This Man: A Memoir Audiobook

Quotes

• “Narrator Bronson Pinchot delivers this memoir with a wistful tone and dramatic timing…The result is an engaging memoir built on an emotional roller coaster of missed opportunities. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”

  — AudioFile

• “Wickedly compelling…By turns funny and wrenching, the narrative is an unforgettable tour de force of memory, love, and imagination.”

  — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

• “Skyhorse follows The Madonnas of Echo Park with an account of his own Los Angeles childhood in the Echo Park neighborhood in a family so dysfunctional it seems to be fictional…A harrowing, compulsively readable story of one man’s remarkable search for identity.”

  — Booklist

• “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, New York Times bestselling author

• “The details of Brando Skyhorse’s life are as outlandish and attention grabbing as his name. Imagine the kind of mother who advertises you for adoption in the back of a magazine and then denies it to your face or the kind of stepfather who calls his prison ‘Arizona State,’ as if discussing his alma mater. Take This Man is a funny and harrowing and touching portrait of the abyss in families between what we know we should do and how our hearts lead us to behave.”

  — Jim Shepard, National Book Award finalist

• “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

• “Brando Skyhorse’s unputdownable Take This Man is one of the most moving and mesmerizing memoirs I’ve ever read. I’m still reeling. Its familial dysfunction rivals The Glass Castle, the poetry of the language echoes This Boy’s Life, and the bravery in Skyhorse’s search for answers, for a family, conjures up Wild. Yet Skyhorse’s memoir is wholly and uniquely his own. As his mother’s mantra went: ‘At least it’s never boring.’ And it never is. This is a miraculous memoir from a spectacularly talented writer.”

  — Susannah Cahalan, New York Times bestselling author

• “Skyhorse’s vivid and idiosyncratic family memoir traces his ongoing struggle to search for an identity and fatherly guidance amidst his entanglement in his mother’s chaotic lifestyle…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 (starred review)