Hilliker Curse

A raw, explicit memoir as high-intensity and riveting as any of Ellroy's novels. The theme: the author's obsessive pursuit of women. 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 "e;atonement in women."e;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 "e;summoned her dead."e; 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 c ur. 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.