The Hilliker Curse
My Pursuit of Women
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4.3 • 7 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The New York Times bestselling crime writer and author of The Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential gives us a searing, candid memoir about his obsession with women, his related search for atonement, and his remarkable literary career. • “Forceful and unsparing in its revelations.... Marvelous fury, passion and energy.” —San Francisco Chronicle
The year was 1958. Jean Hilliker had divorced her hustler husband and resurrected her maiden name. Her son, James, was ten years old. In a dark moment, he “summoned her dead.” Three months later she was murdered. The curse was evoked, and James Ellroy began his unending pursuit of women. Here, he 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 startling revelation, a treatise on guilt and the power of malediction, and above all, a heartfelt confession, The Hilliker Curse is a brilliant, soul-baring revelation of self.
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.
