The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women
James Ellroy
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.
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About James Ellroy
Reviews for The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women
The Economist
We turn the pages gripped with a rubbernecker's fascination ... It is ugly, beautiful, reprehensible and moving. In other words, a hard book to forget
Irish Times
High-octane ... A breathless piece of writing ... When it comes to pinning down the most startling possible word collision, Ellroy's acrobatic pizzazz is beyond doubt ... This is literary knife-throwing at its most exhilarating and dangerous
Julie Myerson
Guardian
A painfully honest book, written in Ellroy's usual blunt, breathless but often starkly beautiful prose ... a marvellous read, sly, self-mocking and filled with troubling insight
Time Out
James Ellroy's crime novels have been much acclaimed for their dark plots, tough prose and generally bleak view of the world. Now that he's brought those same qualities to bear on a history of his relationships with women, the result, inevitably, is not for the faint-hearted ... Ellroy writes with such swagger and certainty that it's hard not to be swept along. He also - let's face it - has quite a tale to tell
Daily Mail