Celadon BooksThe Airborne Toxic Event frontman Mikel Jollett has landed on The New York Times Best Sellers list with his new memoir, Hollywood Park.
The book, which is accompanied by a new Airborne album of the same name, debuted at number eight on the Hardcover Nonfiction Books ranking.
Jollett started working on Hollywood Park, which begins with his family escaping the infamous Synanon cult when he was a young child, following the death of his father. As he tells ABC Audio, he was especially inspired by the Ta-Nehisi Coates book Between the World and Me, which the author wrote as a letter to his son.
“I just loved that book,” Jollett says. “So I thought, ‘Well, maybe I’ll write a letter to my dad.'”
Jollett is an avid reader, and counts Alice Munro, Philip Roth, Vladimir Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgeraldand Toni Morrison as some of his favorite authors.
“I never studied literature,” he says. “I don’t know what they talk about in literature classes, but I always read a lot.”
Jollett’s favorite part about reading books, he explains, is when he hits the “wind-swept plain of page 200.”
“I like it when it feels like there’s no one else alive, and there’s no one else communing, but I’m just in the thoughts of the author in the middle of a story, and it feels like there’s no one else on Earth,” Jollett says.
“Here’s this brilliant person telling me things that I know that they’ve never told anyone else, or it feels that way, anyway.”
“I think there’s parts of [Hollywood Park] that are like that,” he adds. “That’s what I was trying to do, is establish that sort of connection with the reader.”
By Josh Johnson
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