The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

This is the second memoir from James Ellroy and it is different from My Dark Places. That book is more historical and journalistic. The Hilliker Curse is, for lack of a better word, more spiritual. Where My Dark Places spoke of Ellroy's search (with the help of Bill Stoner) for his mother's killer, The Hilliker Curse speaks of Ellroy's search for the love of women. The first book was an investigation; this book is a quest. One is not better than the other (despite what Ellroy might say); they are simply different.

Ellroy's angry love relationship with his mother (who struck him when he elected to live with his father) is deep, troubled and obsessive. It displaces into his search for the love of other women and into the writing of novels to win their hearts and attention. Now that he has found peace, with his new relationship, he is able to see the arc of his life, the arc of his work and the arc of the psychosexual dimensions of his identity with greater clarity. In The Hilliker Curse he charts them.

The writing is urgent, honest and impassioned. He gives us names and he gives us details. He exposes the raw nerves, the personal pathologies and the rhythms of his life. The book is one of the very few examples of confessional, high-romantic but (as he puts it) tory autobiography.

The book is an essential one for Ellroy fans and scholars. It illuminates the dark places but also floods them with unexpected light. It is an exceptionally good read, for those with a taste for fevered autobiography. Most important, it speaks to something which is not in high favor these days, but should be--the nature of the creative process. Ellroy is at his most compelling and most obsessive when he writes. Using 300- and 400-page outlines he builds large and imposing narratives consisting of armies of characters whose actions converge on a tiny number of extremely important incidents. He is charting America by looking into its dark corners and he gets to those dark corners by way of his own dark places.

We hear enough about his mother to sketch in the background, very little about his first marriage, a great deal about his marriage to Helen Knode, a lot about his mismatched relationship with a Bay Area professor named Joan (whose transmuted analogue, Joan Klein, figures prominently in Blood's A Rover) and we learn more than I would have expected about his new relationship, with Erika Schickel, to whom the book is dedicated.

I suggest that diehard fans and scholars check out his hour-long interview with Erika that is available on the internet. She tries to deflect attention from their relationship and focus on his writing. At one point she refers to his relationship with Joan as his personal Bay of Pigs. He responds that if that was the case then his relationship with Erika was his personal fall of the Berlin wall. In that moment he was inadvertently summarizing it all: Ellroy as frightened, troubled boy, novelistic colossus, chronicler of America and desperate lover of women--all formed into a single, seamless, strange but fascinating whole.

Highly recommended.

This is another attempt by the author to exorcise the demons left by the tragic strangulation murder of his own mother in 1958 when he was only ten years of age. It is quite understandable how such a tragic occurrence could afflict a young mind, but it still remains a personalized account and we can't generalize how each of us individually would handle such an occurrence, nor should we hope to ever find out. In his earlier work My Dark Places he unsuccessfully attempted with aid of a retired police detective to solve his mother's murder. The title of this book derives from the fact that his mother's maiden name was HILLIKER. This book was an attempt to show how he tried to cure himself through various schemes as drug and alcohol abuse, paraphilias not limited to S & M,plus numerous visits to prostitutes and other one-night stands, in addition to writing books about his problem.

I think the book is okay, but certainly not up to his earlier works as L.A. Confidential or The Black Dahlia and which were later turned into movies. I simply liked his earlier works better, but for others who have not read them or who might be interested in a personalized account of clinical depression among other problems this just might be your cup of tea. It's not a literary masterpiece, but you still might like it, especially if you are a Ellroy aficionado.

At least ten years ago crime writer/novelist James Ellroy wrote MY DARK PLACES. It was a rather intriguing look at his mother's unsolved murder and the ripples that resonated throughout his life because of that loss. It covered his life which had fallen apart, a presumed redemption of sorts through writing, and the burning desire to find his mother's murderer. At that time it appeared that his life had finally turned around. As I recall, Ellroy was married for a second time and had relocated from Los Angeles (the city that made him) and was living in bucolic splendor in Kansas. Fast forward to now. Ellroy is divorced, in a new relationship that is presumably a keeper, and not in Kansas anymore.
THE HILLIKER CURSE revisits his life and peripherally skirts around his mother's murder again to reveal his abysmal track record with women, his unending search for 'her'(the ultimate muse/right woman), and his transition from career thief and druggie/drunk to well-known author.
My major problem with this book is the way it is written. Ellroy projects this
street hip personna through a first person account of his life which is peppered (or saturated) with Ellroy-isms. I'm going to describe his style as Sam Spade meets film noir. I found it interesting, but I suspect most readers except die-hard fans might find this an exercise in creative writing that is just plain irritating and distracting.
The other negative is that it becomes rapidly apparent that the narrative is going to drone on miserably re: Ellroy's problem with healthy relationships/personal intimacy. It seems sort of strange to devote an entire book to his problems with women that apparently stemmed from his lousy relationship with his mother. The really sad aspect to all of this is that in the end I really wasn't all that certain Ellroy had truly evolved and kicked this 'curse'. I suspect that reading Freud might be more informative.
The end shot is that while this book was somewhat interesting to me, I'm not sure it would be that interesting to most readers. As a writer, I generally think Ellroy is gifted and interesting and has a noirish charm. When it comes to writing about his own problems, I wish he wouldn't.