The Hilliker Curse
My Pursuit of Women
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A raw, explicit memoir as high-intensity and riveting as any of Ellroy's novels. The theme: the author's obsessive pursuit of women. America's greatest living crime writer gives us a raw, brutally candid memoir-as high intensity and as riveting as any of his novels-about his obsessive search for "atonement in women."
The year was 1958.Jean Hilliker had divorced her fast-buck hustler husband and resurrected her maiden name.Her son, James, was ten years old.He hated and lusted for his mother and "summoned her dead." She was murdered three months later.
The Hilliker Curse is a predator's confession, a treatise on guilt and the power of malediction, and above all a cri de cœur. Ellroy unsparingly describes his shattered childhood, his delinquent teens, his writing life, his love affairs and marriages, his nervous breakdown and the beginning of a relationship with an extraordinary woman who may just be the long-sought Her.
A layered narrative of time and place, emotion and insight, sexuality and spiritual quest, The Hilliker Curse is a brilliant, soul-baring revelation of self.It is unlike any memoir you have ever read.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ellroy s narration of his memoir of how his mother s brutal rape and murder molded him sexually and psychically is as utterly distinctive as anything as he has done. Full of vim and vigor, this reading is a bit like mad beat poetry, as staccato sentences, wild almost jazz styling (a low-cut dress reveals boooo-coop back ) take sentences in unfailingly entertaining if unintentionally hilarious directions. It s dark stuff Ellroy is relating his early Peeping Tom proclivities, for example but his odd emphases, the way he trumpets small, unimportant facts as if there were a big reveal ( He sold Buicks! She bought a red and white sedan! ) elicits more laughter than the writer perhaps intended. A Knopf hardcover.
