Take This Man: A Memoir

Brando Skyhorse

Jun 2014 · Sold by Simon and Schuster

About this ebook

Named one of Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Books of 2014
One of NBC News’s 10 Best Latino Books of 2014

“A West Coast version of Augusten Burroughs’s Running With Scissors...A funny, shocking, generous-hearted book” (Entertainment Weekly) about a boy, his 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 immigrant father. His mother, Maria, dreaming of a more exciting life, saw no reason for her son to live as a Mexican American just because he was born one. With the help of Maria’s ruthless imagination and a hastily penned jailhouse correspondence, the life of “Brando Skyhorse,” the Native American 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, where Brando and his mother live with his acerbic grandmother and a rotating cast of surrogate fathers. It will be thirty years before Brando begins to untangle the truth, when a surprise discovery leads him to his biological father at last.

From this PEN/Hemingway Award–winning novelist comes an extraordinary literary memoir capturing a mother-son story unlike any other and a boy’s single-minded search for a father, wherever he can find one.

Ratings and reviews

Although my life is not a direct parallel to Brando's, the story resonates within my spirit so vibrantly. I was abandoned by both parents as an early teen due to their lack of drive, and faced many difficulties with minimal to no resources. I was not orphaned in the foster care system, therefore I was basically homeless. I moved from friend's home to friend's home because no one had the financial resources to look out for me. The emotion that I read in this book about finding one's self and knowing who you are as an individual and what group you belong with, is something that I still work through at 38 years of age. I am inspired to finish my own memoir, of which I have not made a dent in. I appreciate the detail provided for the story and it inspires me to move forward with making my own public. I sympathize with Brando regarding his attachment and detachment from his mother. He wanted to love her, but she just did not want love. She seemed not to know what was best for her and her child.

About the author

Brando Skyhorse’s debut novel, The Madonnas of Echo Park, won the 2011 PEN/Hemingway Award and the Sue Kaufman Award for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His memoir, Take This Man, was named one of Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Books of 2014 and one of NBC News’s 10 Best Latino Books of 2014. A recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center fellowship, Skyhorse teaches English and creative writing at Indiana University Bloomington.