synopsis & author bio
How one special needs boy taught his father about love, God and everything else
Johnny Bollow’s candid memoir of special needs parenting cinematically weaves together three generations of fatherhood as he comes to terms with the terrorizing, mysterious and ultimately hopeful tale of his developmentally disabled son, Sam.
As drugs, diet therapy and experimental treatments bring calm to Sam’s epilepsy, his mind remains erratic and confused, defying all attempts at understanding. As Sam descends further into the mania of his condition, Johnny is haunted by memories of his own father, his stories, and his constant benediction: “Remember, as you go through life, you’re the greatest.” But the blessing of Johnny’s father nags him as an impossible, unanswerable proposition: how can someone so broken be great?
Seamlessly shifting scenes between the Seventies, World War II, and the present day, the reader is drawn into a vicarious narrative of sensory detail and heartstopping awe; as Johnny’s wife, Lori, curates a life of wonder through heartbreak; his children offer laughter in the midst of loss; Sam emerges from his fog to give preternatural insight; and a hidden God begins to show His hand, unfolding a story of mystery and hope with no easy answers.
About the author
It was the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Johnny, 21, talked his way backstage to interview Boris Grebenshikov, the first Russian musician to get a contract with a Western record label. Sitting on the floor of the green room with an open bottle, Grebenshikov looked over his purple-shaded John Lennon glasses, poured Johnny a drink, and chastised all of America for the temperature of the wine: “Why do you people always chill it?” Glasnost, Gorbachev, and God — the Russian waxed eloquent about it all. The feature came out in the final winter of the Cold War and Johnny’s writing career was born. An article about a Gulf War family was followed by more assignments from magazines and newspapers. But Johnny always came back to real life stories, which landed him in The Saturday Evening Post with a feature on the forgotten women aviators of World War II, “the WASPs.”
After transitioning into copywriting for ad agencies, the pull of the true-life story lay dormant until his 9-month-old son, Sam, was diagnosed with epilepsy in 2008. Confronted with a mystery that had no answers, Johnny went back to his roots and began chronicling a ten-year journey that resulted in his new memoir of three generations of fatherhood, “Remember, You’re the Greatest: How one special needs boy taught his father about love, God and everything else.” Interlaced with his father’s stories that recall the hardship of The Great Depression, World War II combat, and his childhood in the Seventies, Johnny’s book is eliciting comparisons to the non-fiction of Anne Lamott and Annie Dillard, the humor of P.J. O’Rourke, and legends such as Frank McCourt and Mark Helprin.
Longtime USC writing professor Dr. Lee Cerling summed up Johnny as “One of those rare writers whose voice you simply want to listen to. Every incident, each detail, is graced and elevated with a kind of loving, attentive prose. So, you want to hear his stories, his anecdotes, his exquisite metaphors — you don’t much care what he is writing about, because you feel that his writing about it will make it worth your while to pay attention; and that, quite possibly, if you pay attention well enough, you might learn something about how better to live your life in this mad, confusing, painful, yet wonderful world.”
