The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women
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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... 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. (Sept)
