...a memoir that’s dangerous, immediate and lyrical from the jump ... Before his band’s first-ever gig, Mr. Jollett gives himself a pep talk. 'You have to show them. You came all this way. Now just show them.' In Hollywood Park, his first book, Mr. Jollett shows us how far he came. We see him banged-up and transcendent in the pursuit of learning that magic trick, of turning what is broken into beauty and making it useful.

In his frank and poignant first book, Jollett tries to capture the path to discovering the forces that shaped him. He writes from the perspective of a child and adolescent who slowly grows aware of his circumstances. Jollett has an innate sensitivity and eye for detail. You sense that any novel he’d write would be a good one, a Denis Johnson-esque tale rife with drifters and drugs and couples hitting the skids ... As he gets older he sometimes works himself up into the kind of rhetorical lather best suited for teenage diaries. Airborne Toxic Event songs aren’t verse-chorus-verse so much as verse-verse-increasingly-anguished-verse, and Jollett can get equally overdramatic on the page ... He takes his time, but he’s never boring; it’s a curious but pleasant surprise to notice that by the halfway point of this nearly 400-page book he hasn’t even hit puberty yet ... Jollett doesn’t miss his childhood — nobody would regret escaping what he has — but he writes with an understandable affection for the kid who made him who he was.

Notably, [Jollet's] earliest years were spent at Synanon, a drug rehabilitation program that devolved into a notoriously violent cult. As a result, the earliest parts of his memoir contain chilling anecdotes about the repressive, bizarre, and dehumanizing experience of life there. What narratively works is that Jollett, being only a small child at the time, didn't know a world outside Synanon — so the scenes of cult life have a sheen of innocence to them, lending a real eeriness ... Jollett's account of his life in music — as a musician and a journalist — is less compelling than the story of his family, but is not without interest. As he finds meaning in music, it's often about how it helped him overcome the pain, the emotional deprivation, the stolen childhood. While this is meaningful and important life experience to share, I really would have liked to have read more about his thoughts on music as an art form, more on the craft of songwriting, or maybe even just more about the ideas that guide his life. He's capable of it; the memoir has clear literary ambition ... Hollywood Park succeeds most in compassionately depicting the suffering and struggle of others with addiction: those left to obscurity; those barely holding on. Jollett's life story shows that you can pass through the gauntlet of pain and trauma to self-reliance and sustainable meaning. But most importantly, it shows that whether suffering is redemptive or pointless, the pain is the constant. Overcoming it is managing it.

While his first book is being touted as a memoir about growing up in the Synanon cult, Jollett, frontman for the band Airborne Toxic Event, actually writes much more about his life after escaping it ... He is a very good writer able to relay details of his difficult life, even as a young child, and despite occasionally overwrought descriptions, the story remains engaging and heartbreaking. A good choice for fans of memoirs about overcoming dysfunctional childhoods like Educated...and The Glass Castle...

A painstaking emotional accounting of a tortured youth ultimately redeemed through music, therapy, and love ... For the first third of the book, the author attempts to portray the world, and the English language, as he perceived it at age 5 and 6 ... This becomes tiring, and since Jollett's mother was ultimately diagnosed with a personality disorder, the level of detail and repetition with regard to her maternal failures is overdone. The author's father, though an ex-con and former addict, is the story’s hero; he is beautifully written and lights up the book ... the teenage portion of the book, during which he often lived with his father in Los Angeles, is a smoother read. Ultimately, as he lucidly shows, music would change his life ... A musician proves himself a talented, if long-winded, writer with a very good memory.

...[an] arresting debut memoir ... Jollett engagingly narrates his story, which includes living, after leaving Synanon, in Oregon with his mother, a needy narcissist who brainwashed him into believing that kids take care of their moms, not the other way around; loving his father while hoping to never be like him; and dealing with his addict brother. Jollett also talks about turning pain into music, getting help for abandonment issues, and finding love and starting a family. All this results in a shocking but contemplative memoir about the aftermath of an unhealthy upbringing.