Excerpt from Take This Man by Brando Skyhorse, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I found out I was Mexican when I was around twelve or thirteen. My mother forbade me from telling anyone our story. I kept our secret long after I needed to because my mother's lie had become my whole truth.

It would be thirty-three years from the time he left before I tried to find my biological father, Candido Ulloa, in earnest. By then I'd had so many fathers that even the idea of a father—the very word father—seemed absurd, like a joke whose punch line had to be explained to me. I'd grown proud of my wounded independence—I stand here as my own man—because I'd built it myself from the wreckage each father left behind, shred by abandoned shred. I didn't believe that understanding my biological father's abandonment and vanishing could offer me anything except explanations I claimed I no longer needed or a reconciliation I bragged I wasn't interested in. Daddies were for children, not grown men. All I had of Candido were some pictures and the Mexican surname he'd left behind. (My mother had much less from her own Mexican biological father; she was raised by her Filipino stepfather, Emilio.) Years of speculation and misdirection led me to imagine every sort of fantastical reason for Candido's disappearance: amnesia, murder, abduction back to Mexico. I knew he'd stay lost if I didn't search for him, and I suspected already how little of my father there'd be left for me if I did find him. I'd been prepped by books and movies for how long and impossible a search for an estranged father was.

It took Google about ten minutes to find my father. There he was one winter night in 2010 on WhitePages.com. His home was a half-hour drive from the neighborhood where I was born and raised.

I'd found him. What now?

I'm a writer. I write to understand what I don't know. So I wrote my father a letter. And I started to write this book.

My letter was unremarkable and efficient, accompanied with a Spanish translation, and signed with my current legally changed name. (The name my father gave me was in a parenthetical.) Attached were five scanned photographs from my childhood that had miraculously survived my mother's habitual purging of the past; the idea of that, I think, was to make it easier for her to carry only the truths she wanted into the future. I also included a recent photograph of me as an adult. I imagined this picture might have resembled the kind of man my father was at my age, though I had no photos of him after 1976. He had been twenty-six years old when he left our family for good. I was thirty-six when I sent him my letter.

I chose these pictures to rend heartstrings and appeal to a conscience that my mother, and thirty-three years of silence, had led me to expect didn't exist. There'd been no letters, birthday phone calls, Christmas cards, or a penny in child support. How could my father be anything but a coward and a monster? Yet there he is in a photograph spoon-feeding me in an outdoor café on Olvera Street, cradling my infant head. Or carting me like a chubby pillow to a sleepover while my mother, in a goofy wool cap, vine-clings to his arm with a flirtatious daddy's girl smile. Another photo is from my third birthday party, and it's the last picture my father and I took together. My cake has Indians and a teepee on it, which I'm sure my mother picked out. The camera cuts off most of my father. He leans in from the side, holding me at arm's length so I won't follow him out of the frame. Later my mother would caption this picture on its back, "Brando Skyhorse Johnson and Uncle Candy."

I'd spent my whole life trying to follow Candido out of that photograph, through lies, misdirections, and detours in other men. I was searching for a father and for who I was. When you're a child, you think your family works in a straight line. Then you get older and find out where the curves are. What I found was a lesson about how a broken home can make a whole family but not until I was willing to listen to the whole story. Patience helps you put the pieces together. Sifting through my mother's lies, I discovered she'd told me one real thing over and over again—five true words—if only I'd paid attention:

Excerpted from Take This Man by Brando Skyhorse. Copyright © 2014 by Brando Skyhorse. Excerpted by permission of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.