The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women

From “one of the great American writers of our time” (Los Angeles Times Book Review): a raw, explicit memoir as high-intensity and riveting as any of his novels.

The year was 1958. James Ellroy was ten years old. His mother, Jean Hilliker, had divorced her fast-buck hustler husband. She gave her son a choice: live with his father or her. He chose his father, and Jean—“half gassed”—attacked him. He wished her dead. Three months later, she was murdered.

Ellroy writes, “I owe her for every true thing that I am. I must remove the malediction I have placed on her and on myself,” and in The Hilliker Curse, he narrates his quest for “atonement in women.” He unsparingly describes his shattered childhood, his delinquent teens, his writing life, his love affairs and marriages, a nervous breakdown and the beginning of a relationship with an extraordinary woman who may just be the long-sought Her. It is a layered narrative of time and place, emotion and insight, sexuality and spiritual quest. And all of it is reported with gut-wrenching and heart-rending candor.

A brilliant and soul-baring revelation of self—and unlike any memoir you have ever read.

From the Hardcover edition.

"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. (Sept)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright PWyxz LLC)

Reported with gut-wrenching and heart-rending candor, this raw, explicit memoir is as high-intensity and riveting as any of Ellroy's novels: a brilliant and soul-baring revelation of self.

The legendary 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 after his mother and “summoned her dead.” She was murdered three months later.

The Hilliker Curse is a predators confession, a treatise on guilt and on the power of malediction, and above all, a cri de cœur. James 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.

From the Hardcover edition.

James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He is the author of the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy—American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Bloods A Rover—and the L. A. Quartet novels, The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L. A. Confidential, and White Jazz. American Tabloid was Time magazines Best Book (fiction) of 1995; his memoir My Dark Places was a Time Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Notable Book for 1996. The Cold Six Thousand was a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2001. He lives in Los Angeles.

From the Hardcover edition.