The Hilliker Curse

My Pursuit of Women

By Ellroy, James

Publishers Summary:
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 predator’s 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.

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ISBN
978-0-30759-350-4
Publisher
Knopf


REVIEWS

Library Journal

Reviewed on September 15, 2010

In his second memoir, Ellroy (L.A. Confidential) attempts to dispel a curse that began with the murder of his mother, Jean Hilliker, when he was ten years old, which is more thoroughly explored in his previous memoir, My Dark Places. His mother's murder came three months after he had wished her dead. That he should have behavioral cha...Log In or Sign Up to Read More

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