Review: Brando Skyhorse finds out truth about his 'Indian' dad

Skyhorse’s childhood was unusual. The name Skyhorse is not the one that appears on his birth certificate but was part of a more dramatic identity imagined for him by his mother, “a Mexican who wanted to be an American Indian”: At age 3, “I became Brando Skyhorse, an American Indian activist, incarcerated for armed robbery. . . . She became Running Deer Skyhorse.” His mother, whose real name was Maria Teresa and who was for a time a phone-sex operator, advertised in a magazine to give him away for adoption, although she denied she had done so. Through his teenage years, he was ambushed by a hailstorm of his mother’s pathological lying.Often using butcher knives to emphasize even the most skewed of her opinions, she dated men “like a chess master in the park playing five games at once.” (He had five stepfathers.) Yet Skyhorse loved her deeply.

Given this background, it’s a miracle of perseverance that Skyhorse sailed through high school and lit out for Stanford, then the University of California at Irvine, then to New York. Paranoid depression was a hellhound always on his trail. And yet there is a kind of redemption in his harrowing journey: He became a splendid writer. His 2010 novel, “The Madonnas of Echo Park,” won a PEN/Hemingway award.

Every page of “Take This Man” contains, in deftly agitated prose, a duet between a depleted spirit and the grandiosity of daily life — well, at least the life of Brando Skyhorse. After just a dozen pages, it becomes clear that Skyhorse is an expert at how we are shaped by improbable circumstances.