The memoir paints such an emotionally stark environment that when I chat with the now-grown Skyhorse in his Bushwick home, I’m surprised to find him remarkably well adjusted. Although entirely Mexican-American by descent, he was raised by his compulsively colorful mother (assisted by his grandmother and five successive eccentric stepfathers) to believe that he was a Native American.Īccompanying the precocious Skyhorse (birth name: Brando Kelly Ulloa) through this mercurial world of shifting identities and half-truths is a surreal and often heartbreaking experience involving near death at the hands of his mother, her fledgling career as a telephone sex operator, and the pain and confusion of watching his various ex-con and conman “fathers” enter and exit his life. Skyhorse, whose novel The Madonnas of Echo Park earned him the 2011 PEN/Hemingway Award, grew up in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. (Photo: Kirsten O’Regan)If you’re always complaining about your messed-up childhood and your wacko family, then you might want to read Brando Skyhorse’s memoir, Take this Man, for some perspective.
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