I'd spent all my years since trying to put those days behind me... Those awkward late teen years are difficult for everyone under the best of circumstances — even if you'd found yourself living in a modest cookie cutter house in an Ozzie and Harriet neighborhood at the time. I, on the other hand, found myself struggling to learn who I was and was going to grow up to be while sequestered at the Mullholland Farm — the place that time (and I felt hope) had forgotten.

Designed to keep a prying public and press at bay, the 'Flynn House' (as I called it) positively oozed a desperate isolation that probably required all of those storied orgies once upon a time to even feel habitable.

At that time in my life, the fact that it was as quiet as a coffin, and removed enough from life so that no one could hear you scream made it a great place to rehearse my first band... And a lousy place to get stuck when your parents are divorced, your remaining parent is perpetually on the road, and you're still too young to drive. The only things left to keep me company were the ghosts of what once were quite happy times (or so I hear) and the very real ghosts that liked to sit on my bed and hold me down so I couldn't move.

Living at that house made me realize that I love people above and beyond things — and that no big house will ever feel like a home unless there is life, love, and togetherness within it's walls. And that is the path I pursue to this day, and for this, I must be grateful to The Mullholland Farm.

This book does its job too well for my liking. It puts me right back there, and I never want to go there again. But I'm glad I read it... And I'm glad I was reminded of the fact that a house is just a pile of stones and sticks, no matter how famous it is. It's the love inside it that can turn any man's hovel into a castle, and the lack of it that turned one man's castle into this man's prison.

— Gunnar Nelson, son of Rick Nelson and founding member of
the platinum-selling rock band Nelson