Book description
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 cour.
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.
James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He is the author of the
acclaimed 'LA Quartet':
The Black Dahlia
,
The Big Nowhere
,
LA Confidential
and
White Jazz
. His most recent novel,
Blood's a Rover
, completes the magisterial 'Underworld USA Trilogy' - the first two
volumes of which (
American Tabloid
and
The Cold Six Thousand
) were both
Sunday Times
bestsellers.
