Ask the Author: Mikel Jollett
Answered Questions (9)
Mikel Jollett
It never occurred to me to fictionalize it. The question that started the memoir was, “Why am I so sad?” After my dad died, I knew what I wanted to write about. Why did his death hit me so hard? He was sick for a lot of years, we knew he was going to only last so long. He actually lived longer than we thought he would because he kept doing his regimen. I thought I was going to write a much shorter book. I think I set out to write something like a 30,000-word memoir.
I had just finished 'Between the World and Me,' a brilliant book by Ta-Nehisi Coates, where the device was a letter to his son about race. When I read that I thought, “I want to do something similar but maybe a letter to my father.” It’s going to be about addiction, mental illness, and I wanted to get into that. So, I started to write a book about my dad, and the more I got into it, I realized I needed to give the kid a voice.
The artist part of my head doesn’t care about the personhood. Whether I’m writing a book or writing a song, I don’t even think about how I’m going to feel about singing it or having it be in the world. For years it didn’t even cross my mind. Then when the book was done, before I even signed on with Celadon Books, it occurred to me that it was really personal. I then started having the fear of exposure. But it didn’t cross my mind when I was writing it. My focus was really just capturing the story perfectly; I didn’t care how I felt about it.
I had just finished 'Between the World and Me,' a brilliant book by Ta-Nehisi Coates, where the device was a letter to his son about race. When I read that I thought, “I want to do something similar but maybe a letter to my father.” It’s going to be about addiction, mental illness, and I wanted to get into that. So, I started to write a book about my dad, and the more I got into it, I realized I needed to give the kid a voice.
The artist part of my head doesn’t care about the personhood. Whether I’m writing a book or writing a song, I don’t even think about how I’m going to feel about singing it or having it be in the world. For years it didn’t even cross my mind. Then when the book was done, before I even signed on with Celadon Books, it occurred to me that it was really personal. I then started having the fear of exposure. But it didn’t cross my mind when I was writing it. My focus was really just capturing the story perfectly; I didn’t care how I felt about it.
Mikel Jollett
In the rock and roll world, when I tell people my band name, they get this look like you’re this bad punk band from Orange County. They don’t get the reference to 'White Noise.' But so far, in the world of publishers, books and readers, everyone gets the reference. It’s great to have that name in the books’ world. I read 'The Mars Room' by Rachel Kushner, 'Less' by Andrew Sean Greer, and 'Normal People' by Sally Rooney. What’s coming up for me is 'Station Eleven' by Emily St. John Mandel. I’m going through a science-fiction phase, so I read 'Never Let Me Go' by Kazuo Ishiguro, which was amazing. Also coming up for me is 'The Remains of the Day' by Kazuo Ishiguro, because I’ll be in an Ishiguro phase. Then I think I’m going to move on to more Rachel Kushner, 'The Flamethrowers' I hear is amazing, and then 'Going After Cacciato' by Tim O’Brien. He is one of my favorite authors — he wrote a book called 'The Things They Carried' — so I’m very excited about that.
Mikel Jollett
“True” is the final song on the record Hollywood Park which is the soundtrack that the band and I made as a companion piece to the book. It’s about the time spent in the hospital with my father. In the modern world you often know when someone’s going to die weeks or months before they do. And you know when it’s really the end. It’s hard at that time because everyone shows up at the hospital to say their goodbyes and there’s no word that’s going to make it okay. You just show up for the person and show up for each other. That song was about that time and conversations I had with my brother, my mom, Bonnie, and my wife about my dad, trying to wrap my head around the enormity of the loss that was coming. I chose to end the record with the metaphor of the dust, which starts off as the dust of the racetrack and ends up becoming the dust of his ashes.
Mikel Jollett
Honestly, putting out a book like this scares me. I worked so hard at this book — I had 13 drafts. I went over every single word just trying to get the story right. I had this dream of this book I wanted the whole world to read, and then I was just terrified about people reading it because it’s just so personal. I think that’s called “fear of exposure.” It’s terrifying to have all your private thoughts and anguish and vulnerabilities — the things that were uncomfortable to write — out there for the world. That scares me.
The other thing that scares me is becoming a parent. Since the book was published, we have a second kid, a baby girl. My biggest fear in the world is that my kids are going to get hurt. And it’s weird how quickly things shift. The minute my son was born, I thought, I don’t even matter anymore; my job is a vessel of protection for these other creatures.
The other thing that scares me is becoming a parent. Since the book was published, we have a second kid, a baby girl. My biggest fear in the world is that my kids are going to get hurt. And it’s weird how quickly things shift. The minute my son was born, I thought, I don’t even matter anymore; my job is a vessel of protection for these other creatures.
Mikel Jollett
Short answer is they’re extremely supportive. Everyone’s been very kind, my peers from Synanon, my mom Bonnie, what she would call “kvelling” over the book. People seem to understand that I was trying to give voice to a kid who didn’t have one and felt moved by it. It’s changed how some people in our immediate circle perceive some things, mostly because some things were unearthed.
The person I was most scared to read it was my brother. Tony didn’t know how much the book was about him. We’re close. We hang out. He knew I was writing a memoir, but I don’t think he knew how much of it was about his life, his journey, his struggle, the huge change that he went through. So, I called him when I was done and asked him to read it, and tell me what he thought. I was terrified because it goes into all this detail about his life. He read it in two days and called me over to the house. I went over, and we sat in the kitchen nook and he was just so generous, so warm and willing to share his story and so okay with it. He said, “Listen, I know I don’t always look good in all of this, but neither do you. You’re being honest. I mean, all this happened. I wouldn’t change a word. Maybe someone will read this and come to some new stuff in their lives, and that’s good.” He was as large-hearted a soul about it as he could be.
The person I was most scared to read it was my brother. Tony didn’t know how much the book was about him. We’re close. We hang out. He knew I was writing a memoir, but I don’t think he knew how much of it was about his life, his journey, his struggle, the huge change that he went through. So, I called him when I was done and asked him to read it, and tell me what he thought. I was terrified because it goes into all this detail about his life. He read it in two days and called me over to the house. I went over, and we sat in the kitchen nook and he was just so generous, so warm and willing to share his story and so okay with it. He said, “Listen, I know I don’t always look good in all of this, but neither do you. You’re being honest. I mean, all this happened. I wouldn’t change a word. Maybe someone will read this and come to some new stuff in their lives, and that’s good.” He was as large-hearted a soul about it as he could be.
Mikel Jollett
I started in the child’s voice, and about halfway through writing the book I realized that I wanted to write in four different voices, one for each section of the book. At that point I’d already written an ending, so I deleted that — about 60,000 words — and re-wrote the second half of the book. So, it felt exciting. Philip Roth had this thing of searching for the sentence with the most life. He’d spend months just writing, and he might be a hundred pages in before he gets to a paragraph that he thinks has real life to it, and he’d delete the first hundred pages and start the story there. I didn’t do a hundred pages, but what I did was similar.
I spent around six months gathering the world of the book — writing about places, sights, sounds, smells, memories, and doing interviews with people from Synanon, my brother, my mom and others. During that time, I had all these different voices. One of them was the elegiac “I’m 40 years old and here’s how I’m reflecting on my life” voice, which is how I think most memoirs are, which works. But I thought I should try just writing from the perspective of the day I left Synanon, just put the reader in this room. Then I wrote it and set it aside, and went back and read it a few weeks later. When I read it I said “I want to read that book.” It was Toni Morrison’s thing, where you write the book you want to read. But then I immediately said “I have no idea how to write this.” I could have written an essay, an article or fiction. But I didn’t know what to do. It became this project of how to create the voice so that when I’m writing, I don’t have to think about all the things that go into the voice. I can just write. So, all of that effortlessness took a crazy amount of effort.
I spent around six months gathering the world of the book — writing about places, sights, sounds, smells, memories, and doing interviews with people from Synanon, my brother, my mom and others. During that time, I had all these different voices. One of them was the elegiac “I’m 40 years old and here’s how I’m reflecting on my life” voice, which is how I think most memoirs are, which works. But I thought I should try just writing from the perspective of the day I left Synanon, just put the reader in this room. Then I wrote it and set it aside, and went back and read it a few weeks later. When I read it I said “I want to read that book.” It was Toni Morrison’s thing, where you write the book you want to read. But then I immediately said “I have no idea how to write this.” I could have written an essay, an article or fiction. But I didn’t know what to do. It became this project of how to create the voice so that when I’m writing, I don’t have to think about all the things that go into the voice. I can just write. So, all of that effortlessness took a crazy amount of effort.
Mikel Jollett
No, but it’s really nice to hear you say those things. I realized I was giving this child a voice, and that became the driving force for the book. No one ever asked this kid “Hey man, what’s this like for you?” Maybe because of mental illness or depression, in the case of my mother. And I think there was this sense of “it wasn’t so bad” because no one had really examined what happened at Synanon. They didn’t know how bad things were and how much we were dealing with there. It became almost like this primal scream that I’d been holding in for 30 years, and I got really engulfed in it.
Mikel Jollett
The impetus was my dad’s death. When Dad died, I hardly left the house for nine months. I went through a major depression. I cried every day, I didn’t work on anything and I put on weight. Luckily, I had already met my wife, and she was extremely supportive. We just kind of locked ourselves up in the house and went through it. When I came to, I decided I wanted to write a book about it.
I think memoirs function on detail and voice, but mostly voice. But the voice doesn’t work without the right details. Toni Morrison, one of my idols, had this idea of rememory, the idea that memories live in the places where they occurred. If you ever have the experience of going to your childhood home or somewhere you haven’t been in 20 years, you stand there and suddenly you are just awash in so many memories. It’s not just the things that happened or how everything smelled or looked. You’ll remember entire attitudes, your entire way of thinking from years ago. And you’ll think “oh I totally thought that” for years! But you’ve forgotten because you moved on and became the person that you are now.
I went to all the different places in the book, and I stood there and took tons of notes. Then I’d come home and write for a few days. I had these big documents, anywhere from 20 to 50 pages long, about each place — everything I remembered, how it smelled, looked and sounded. Memory is strange. You pull and pull and eventually you start getting good memories. I also compared notes with other people who were contemporaneous with me to make sure I wasn’t the only one who remembered it that way. We’d talk things through and some people gave me some really good information.
Most of the early part of the book is written from the “we” point of view. That’s my brother and me. He helped me a lot with those pages because he was much older. We’d talk through the very early stuff. Later the voice switches from “we” to “I.” That’s how I constructed the world. Before I ever wrote a word of the book, just creating the world that the book is in was a whole, long process.
Choosing details is also very important, like the part where I first meet Jake and we go to his parents’ house. And my obsession with sugar. I’d always look around for the sugar. I knew there was Fruit Hoops (because it was in the bag). We never had money for Froot Loops, that’s for fancy people. When I wrote about donuts I originally put ‘Hostess’ donuts, but then I thought, No, it was the generic frosted chocolate little donuts in a sleeve. That’s a detail that argues for its existence. Readers hear a detail like that and they trust that they’re on a journey with someone who’s not bullshitting them. It felt really important to choose details that were evocative of the time. Of the different details in the scene I could’ve chosen, I chose the ones that really bring the scene to life.
I think memoirs function on detail and voice, but mostly voice. But the voice doesn’t work without the right details. Toni Morrison, one of my idols, had this idea of rememory, the idea that memories live in the places where they occurred. If you ever have the experience of going to your childhood home or somewhere you haven’t been in 20 years, you stand there and suddenly you are just awash in so many memories. It’s not just the things that happened or how everything smelled or looked. You’ll remember entire attitudes, your entire way of thinking from years ago. And you’ll think “oh I totally thought that” for years! But you’ve forgotten because you moved on and became the person that you are now.
I went to all the different places in the book, and I stood there and took tons of notes. Then I’d come home and write for a few days. I had these big documents, anywhere from 20 to 50 pages long, about each place — everything I remembered, how it smelled, looked and sounded. Memory is strange. You pull and pull and eventually you start getting good memories. I also compared notes with other people who were contemporaneous with me to make sure I wasn’t the only one who remembered it that way. We’d talk things through and some people gave me some really good information.
Most of the early part of the book is written from the “we” point of view. That’s my brother and me. He helped me a lot with those pages because he was much older. We’d talk through the very early stuff. Later the voice switches from “we” to “I.” That’s how I constructed the world. Before I ever wrote a word of the book, just creating the world that the book is in was a whole, long process.
Choosing details is also very important, like the part where I first meet Jake and we go to his parents’ house. And my obsession with sugar. I’d always look around for the sugar. I knew there was Fruit Hoops (because it was in the bag). We never had money for Froot Loops, that’s for fancy people. When I wrote about donuts I originally put ‘Hostess’ donuts, but then I thought, No, it was the generic frosted chocolate little donuts in a sleeve. That’s a detail that argues for its existence. Readers hear a detail like that and they trust that they’re on a journey with someone who’s not bullshitting them. It felt really important to choose details that were evocative of the time. Of the different details in the scene I could’ve chosen, I chose the ones that really bring the scene to life.
Mikel Jollett
Short answer is they’re extremely supportive. Everyone’s been very kind, my peers from Synanon, my mom Bonnie, what she would call “kvelling” over the book. People seem to understand that I was trying to give voice to a kid who didn’t have one and felt moved by it. It’s changed how some people in our immediate circle perceive some things, mostly because some things were unearthed.
The person I was most scared to read it was my brother. Tony didn’t know how much the book was about him. We’re close. We hang out. He knew I was writing a memoir, but I don’t think he knew how much of it was about his life, his journey, his struggle, the huge change that he went through. So, I called him when I was done and asked him to read it, and tell me what he thought. I was terrified because it goes into all this detail about his life. He read it in two days and called me over to the house. I went over, and we sat in the kitchen nook and he was just so generous, so warm and willing to share his story and so okay with it. He said, “Listen, I know I don’t always look good in all of this, but neither do you. You’re being honest. I mean, all this happened. I wouldn’t change a word. Maybe someone will read this and come to some new stuff in their lives, and that’s good.” He was as large-hearted a soul about it as he could be.
The person I was most scared to read it was my brother. Tony didn’t know how much the book was about him. We’re close. We hang out. He knew I was writing a memoir, but I don’t think he knew how much of it was about his life, his journey, his struggle, the huge change that he went through. So, I called him when I was done and asked him to read it, and tell me what he thought. I was terrified because it goes into all this detail about his life. He read it in two days and called me over to the house. I went over, and we sat in the kitchen nook and he was just so generous, so warm and willing to share his story and so okay with it. He said, “Listen, I know I don’t always look good in all of this, but neither do you. You’re being honest. I mean, all this happened. I wouldn’t change a word. Maybe someone will read this and come to some new stuff in their lives, and that’s good.” He was as large-hearted a soul about it as he could be.
About Goodreads Q&A
Ask and answer questions about books!
You can pose questions to the Goodreads community with Reader Q&A, or ask your favorite author a question with Ask the Author.
See Featured Authors Answering Questions
Learn more