NARCISSISM

Books of Interest
 Website: chetyarbrough.blog

Hollywood Park: A Memoir 

By: Mikel Jollett

Narrated By: Mikel Jollett

Narcissism is an excessive sense of self-importance and a lack of empathy for others. Though Mikel Jollett shows skill as a writer, his assessment of life as a child grown-up exhibits a personal blindness about the hardship of single parents.

Every child has a story. This is a memoir of Mikel Jollet’s life. Jollett’s story is about his family that joined what became a cult in the 1960s. It was called Synanon, a rehab program in Santa Monica, California for addicts that began in the late 1950s. The rehab program evolved into a religious movement. As it became a religious movement, its harsh policies drove some residents to flee. Jollett’s story is about leaving with his mother and brother when he is five years old.

To Mikel, leaving was a dramatic break from the Synanon way of life and a father he misses. Jollett’s father was an addict and former convict who lived what seems a vagabond life until he joins Synanon. Mikel’s mother decides to secretly escape with her two boys as the Synanon life became more and more harsh. Despite its growing religiosity and authoritarian milieu, Synanon survives until 1991 when it faces numerous legal issues related to forced sterilizations and violence toward members.

Some of the religious teaching at Synanon appears to have remained with her. After living with her mother and father in California, she chooses to move to Salem, Oregon. The move is motivated by the high cost of living in California and a job she finds in Salem. After some time in Salem, she meets a reformed alcoholic who comes to live with her and the boys. Mikel grows to like the reformed alcoholic, but his mother’s new companion falls off the wagon and leaves the boys and their mother. He returns sometime later, only to leave again.

The boy’s paternal father remains in California and eventually looks up his wife’s children in Oregon. Upon visiting the boys in Salem, he tells them they will be invited to visit him in California, where he lives near the beach. In their first visit they become reacquainted with Bonnie who had been in the Synanon program. Mikel had been emotionally attached to the woman when at Synanon, so he was pleased to see her.

Life is a struggle for most children, even in unbroken families. Being raised in a single parent home, particularly when the single parent is a woman is harder because of societal inequality. Mikel and his brother are boys, so they have better chances for breaking poverty’s cycle, but their mother is faced with greater obstacles. Mikel’s story shows a better chance for success than some children raised by a single parent because of a precocity recognized by the principal at his school in Salem. Precocity is no guarantee of success but being a male and smart are significant advantages.

Tony, as the older brother, was sometimes cruel or uncaring about his younger sibling. As Mikel grew older, he found ways to punish his older brother for his cruelty. As they matured, they reconciled but both left their mother to live with their father in California. The baggage their mother had from her experience at Synanon, her husband’s abandonment, and the circumstances of poverty became too much for Mikel to understand the trials of being a single mother with two children. Mikel’s judgement is that his mother was too narcissistic.

Women struggle with life’s inequality in ways that escape understanding of masculine society, i.e., particularly male children who live with a single mother’s nurturing through the formative years of their lives. Divorced or abandoned mothers often do what they must do to raise children that fathers mostly neglect during the formative years of life. Male parents escape responsibility by leaving their children with mothers. Ex-husbands have the privilege of regaining an independent life in a world that offers better opportunities for men than women. They often re-marry which is what Mikel’s father does.

Jollett concludes his memoir by arguing his mother is a narcissist. Who is the narcissist in “Hollywood Park: A Memoir“? Mikel Jollett fails to understand how difficult it is for a single mother to raise children on her own.