Take This Man

Starred review from March 24, 2014
Skyhorse’s (The Madonnas of Echo Park) 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. Spanning Skyhorse’s life, the book focuses primarily on his childhood growing up Echo Park, Los Angeles, from the late 1970s through the early ’90s.Skyhorse’s mother split with his biological father when he was three and proceeded to shuffle through a slough of unreliable husbands (including alcoholics; ex-cons who get arrested at Disneyland; and deadbeats who steal from the boy’s piggy bank) whom Skyhorse was expected to adopt immediately as fathers (and sometimes to help her seek them out) though most of them didn’t stick around for very long. The only constants at home were his critical, “mythmaking,” phone-sex operator mother (who tells her son he is Indian, though the family is Mexican, and changes his name) and brash, larger-than-life grandmother. As he grows older, Skyhorse tries to detach from his argumentative family, first by leaving for college at Stanford and later with his girlfriend to live in New York City. 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. Agent: Susan Golomb.

Starred review from May 1, 2014
A Mexican-American novelist's wickedly compelling account of a dysfunctional childhood growing up "a full blooded American Indian brave" with five different fathers.Skyhorse's (The Madonnas of Echo Park, 2010) Mexican-born father left the family when the author was 3. Beautiful but prone to exaggeration, his mother, Maria, promptly renamed herself Running Deer and told her son that his father was an incarcerated Native American activist named Paul Skyhorse. While corresponding with her convict lover, the tempestuous Maria began bringing home a series of replacement fathers for her son who became "magicians, able to appear or disappear at will." When the men finally left for good, each contributed to the hole in Skyhorse's life that only "got bigger as [he] got older" and made him question his own ability to ever be a father himself. The stable but witheringly sharp-tongued center of the family home was Maria's mother, June. While her daughter ran her own phone sex business and created the myths that substituted for Skyhorse's true family history, June, a lesbian, "collect[ed] neighborhood stories and barter[ed] them" with everyone she knew. Guilt and anger kept the author emotionally tied to his mother even after he left home and Maria eventually died. He learned to accept himself as a Mexican "who happened to be raised as [his] mother's kind of Indian," but he struggled through broken relationships and bouts of depression. As he gathered up the shards of his life and began to make peace with all of his fathers, especially his biological one, Skyhorse realized the one truth that his storytelling mother and grandmother had known instinctively: that "stories [could] help you survive...and transform your life...from where you are into wherever you want to be."By turns funny and wrenching, the narrative is an unforgettable tour de force of memory, love and imagination.

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April 15, 2014
PEN/Hemingway Award-winning author of "The Madonnas of Echo Park", Skyhorse tells the story of his own upbringing in a working-class area of Los Angeles, trying to find a father figure. He lives with both his mother and grandmother and though actually of Mexican descent, his mother has him and everyone else believing that he and she are Native American, as she believes this gives them greater cachet. Supposedly abandoned by his biological father, Skyhorse attempts to find support and role models through the many stepfathers and boyfriends that his mother accumulates. Unfortunately, these men are as duplicitous as his single parent and don't hang around all that long; only one of them, Frank, continues to maintain a relationship with him over the years. The author's mother's explanation for their life and the myths she has created is "At least it's never boring." The same cannot be said for this memoir. VERDICT There is not much in this hard-luck story to grab on to or connect with, except that it is a wonder that Skyhorse survived. What did come of his life within this dysfunctional family is a love and appreciation for storytelling; though, like his mother, his fiction seems to have more appeal.--Gina Kaiser, J.W. England Lib., Univ. of the Sciences, Philadelphia

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2014
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)