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

What a story! Delusion requires charity, which I, like many people who loved her, was more than happy to offer. There was something about my mother that made you not only want to follow her off a cliff but also to cushion her blow when you both hit the ground. She didn't perform chores or cook any meals; when my mother made ­dinner—and I loved her dishes—it was a tub of cottage cheese sprinkled with Lawry's seasoned salt, or a pound of ground beef mashed into tiny pebbles and either fried to crispy burnt scabs or snacked on raw. My mother nourished me with words.

She started me off young, teaching me to read at two, when, she said, I plopped a book in her lap.

"Teach me," I said. (The book, in her later retellings, morphed into a dictionary.) My mother enrolled me briefly at a Montessori preschool. I spoke out of turn and was punished with an hour of sitting on a green felt mat in the center of the classroom.

"If that's how you punish talking, my son's already smarter than you," she told my teacher. I didn't finish out the week. Later there was a Christian school with a no-hair-below-the-collar policy. My "Indian" hair was to my shoulders.

"Jesus had long hair," I said, and was gone the same day.

My mother bought me phonics workbooks by the stack and checked my answers each night after work. If I did well, as a reward she'd let me brush her long, cherished hair, guiding my hands with a heavy brush across her scalp and down to her waist in a slow, ­languorous rhythm that was like sipping hot tea.

I graduated to learning, and participating in, my mother's narratives. I couldn't hear the lies in her stories. Their frequency was too low for my young ears. Much the way certain singers perform a song a different way each time they sing it, my mother told her stories a different way every time she spoke them. Every one of her stories had at their core one seedling of truth that allowed her, like a jazz musician, to improvise its telling depending on her audience. I loved being her "rhythm section"—sharing our secret language of winks, nods, smiles, and interjections that corroborated her stories as they evolved on the spot in their multiple retellings. In some versions, her embellishments ran over her cup's edges like hot foam; in others, she'd carve out the bottoms of her multiple truths to fit whatever awkward conversational moment she'd stumbled into, like when she met someone eager to hear more about her Indian knowledge and ways. Her history and her experiences were mercury in a barometer, fluctuating based on what she felt you wanted to believe. My mother didn't enjoy movies like my grandmother; those were other people's stories. She wanted to be the story and live her life through these stories. In her stories, though, death, like angry smoke, always found a way in.

"I won't see you grow old," my mother said. "I'm going to die young."

"No!" I said. "You can't die!" Every day, she told me I was wrong.

"I won't live past forty," she said.

Forty came and went. Then: "I won't see you graduate from high school." That passed, too. Finally, bored with years of death scares, I said, "You're not going to die, Mom."

"You're wrong, Brando," she said. "When I was little, I lied to Death. Death doesn't forget."

When my mother was four, my grandmother moved to Lompoc, California, for a brief time to get away from Los Angeles and Emilio. June and Emilio had dated off and on for several years before June had my mother. "Learn how to take money from men you don't want to marry," June's mother, Lucille, told her. "He's a chango, a monkey man with a tail between his legs, like all Filipinos." June took Emilio's gifts and rejected his marriage proposals. Then June met my biological grandfather, Tomás, at a bar in the Grand Central Market downtown. He taught her how to drink beer the right way, cerveza mexicana, he said, with a lemon wedge she sucked on and a dash of salt she licked off the rim of his glass. She shared many cervezas mexicanas with Tomás until he learned she was pregnant.

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.