Sally
asked
Mikel Jollett:
Are you at all surprised about the response to the book? When I first received the advance copy from the publisher I was just expecting another memoir, enjoyable but nothing special. But I have been so touched by the story (and the writing) that I can’t stop talking about it and it seems that has been the universal response. Did you expect that?
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.
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