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James Ellroy

The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women Hardcover – 9 Sept. 2010

by James Ellroy (Author)

3.9 66 ratings

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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.

ISBN-10

0434020648
ISBN-13

978-0434020645
Publisher

William Heinemann
Publication date

9 Sept. 2010
Language

English
Dimensions

14.3 x 2.2 x 22.2 cm
Print length

224 pages
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Product description

Review

A remarkable memoir...Hugely enjoyable. ― 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...An impassioned love letter written by a man who does at least sincerely believe he has now found The One. -- Julie Myerson ― Guardian

A painfully honest book, written in Ellroy's usual blunt, breathless but often starkly beautiful prose...A monument to the author as compassionate lover, intellectual giant, creative powerhouse and emotional truthteller. It's 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 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

About the Author

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 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. His previous novel, This Storm, is the second instalment in Ellroy's second 'L.A. Quartet'.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ William Heinemann (9 Sept. 2010)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0434020648
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0434020645
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 14.3 x 2.2 x 22.2 cm

Best Sellers Rank: 762,659 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 458 in Jazz Musician Biographies
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- 1,495 in Family & Marriage Biographies

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3.9 66 ratings

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James Ellroy

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James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He is the author of the acclaimed L.A. Qurtet - The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential and White Jazz, as well as the Underworld USA trilogy: American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand and Blood's a Rover. He is the author of one work of non-fiction, The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women. Ellroy lives in Los Angeles.

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Rosemary Bartholomew

An eye-opening read into James Ellroy's psyche

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 19 June 2016

Verified Purchase

A non-fiction autobiographical book about the murder of James Ellroy's mother, which remains an unsolved case, and his own life. Factual and for Ellroy fans.

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a daine

Ellroy doesn't disappoint

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 1 April 2015

Verified Purchase

This book is a real treat. It manages to be both moving and hilarious. Ellroy is on top form, strung out on love obsessions with various women both real and imagined. His fantasy life is as vivid as his real life-perhaps this is the essence of his genius. Highly recommended.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 September 2011

Verified Purchase

The thing about writing in the style of egotistical rant is that you need care little for literary convention. Of course, sometimes this can be groundbreakingly experimental and done with memorable effect, or it can be an excuse for writerly laziness. I found this memoir to be an exhaustingly repetitive self-indulgence, which said very little. Lust, marriage and even love were all recognizable, as was psychotic obsession and mental collapse, but so what? There was nothing here that made me see the world differently or delighted me with its ingenuity or perception. The only thing I can say in its favour is that I felt a compulsion to finish it. Perhaps I was driven by a masochistic need to have confirmed that the book would subside to banal anti-climax and tedium.

6 people found this helpful

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Adam Eterno

I was frayed, fraught, french-fried and frazzled...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 8 August 2011

He's crazy, of course - we all know that, because he revels in telling us why - but I doubt there's another author on the planet who can write with Ellroy's intensity.

Even a starry-eyed Ellrovian like me can see the flaws in this account of Ellroy's long history of fraught relationships with women. It's sometimes pretentious, often frustrating, and more than a little self-indulgent. There are some self-justifying passages, and a lot more self-lacerating ones, which I found impossible to read without a twinge of voyeuristic guilt. But a great stylist is at work here, so there's often real power in the writing. The prose is pyrotechnic: freed from the constraints of crime fiction (which he writes in a ruthlessly stripped-down way), Ellroy conjures up strange metaphors and alliterates gleefully; at other times he just gets straight to the point with one crackling line ('Every acknowledgement of my flowering heart gut-shot me with gratitude').

There are superb setpieces. Ellroy describes being left to wait in the street, aged ten, while his father was with a woman: in the hour that he was alone, he managed to get drunk, and started his career as a window-peeper. As a young man, he spent his evenings either hanging around the stage door of the LA Philharmonic, where he tried to get the attention of lady cellists, or cruising for prostitutes on Sunset Strip. Years later, he had a breakdown on the book tour to promote The Cold Six Thousand: at manic speed, he describes cracking up on planes and in blacked-out hotel rooms, frantically checking his skin for cancer and his eyes for signs of impending blindness ('My bowels swelled. I defecated and became convinced that I had colon cancer. The stewardess knocked again... I tremble-walked out of the john. I was sweaty, my fly was down, passengers eyed me weird'). After agreeing with his second wife that their failing marriage would be an open relationship, with new partners allowed, he spent months secretly pursuing another woman, unable to tell his wife the truth, equally unable to stop obsessing about his new love.

Ellroy admits that in the past he has exploited the fact of his mother's murder (he was a child when she died) to increase his notoriety, and he criticises his earlier autobiographical work (My Dark Places) as self-serving. For all its honesty, though, this new memoir is novelistic, given structure and narrative drive by a skilful writer, which makes it feel like an entertainment even though it isn't, or at least shouldn't be. So I'm left with a question that's probably unanswerable: should reading the latest book by my favourite author make me feel this uneasy...?

6 people found this helpful

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AngryToday

I loved it. This probably means you won't!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 16 August 2022

Verified Purchase

A perfect companion to MY DARK PLACES.

This is a raw, blisteringly truthful read. Ellroy is candid, pretentious, deluded, dangerous, manic, egotistically hilarious, obsessive, obnoxious, self-deprecating, but most IMPORTANTLY he is a skilled writer, and memoirist.

Anyone who can't hack his truths, his tirades, his verbosity, his jangled eloquence and nifty pulpist flair, don't bother reading let alone trying to eviscerate this sensational memoir.

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The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women Hardcover – 9 Sept. 2010

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