Take This Man: A Memoir

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, June 2014: Brando Skyhorse channeled the Mexican-American voices of his LA childhood in his PEN/Hemingway award-winning novel The Madonnas of Echo Park. But growing up there, he felt distinctly at the fringes, the outsider son of a Native American chief who’d been imprisoned when a political action turned violent. His mother, living by the caveat “at least it’s never boring,” took up with a string of (sometimes overlapping) stepfathers, each presented as his new dad. But at 30, he discovered this real father was a Mexican who’d disappeared when Brando was three--driven off by his erratic mother, who took that opportunity to dramatically revise their history. In a voice rich with grit and grace, Take This Man tells a taut, absorbing story of searching for a father, reconciling an invented identity with some version of truth, and struggling to understand a mother whose grand fabrications and violent outbursts made his early life so electrifying and recklessly chaotic. He doesn’t sugarcoat, and against such rough terrain, his compassion and humor are astonishing. With this book, Skyhorse claims his place among the best modern memoirists. --Mari Malcolm