The Hilliker Curse

November 29, 2010
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.

July 15, 2010

Noted crime writer Ellroy (Blood's a Rover, 2009, etc.) presents a sharp-tongued, acidic memoir of his life and loves.

The author's loose-living mother, Jean Hilliker, has figured deeply in his previous work—one need only read The Black Dahlia (1987); his father less so, and Ellroy paints him memorably: "He had the bunco-artist gab and the grin...He dodged work and schemed like Sergeant Bilko and the "Kingfish" on Amos & Andy. The pastor at my church called him 'the world's laziest white man.' He had a sixteen-inch schlong. It dangled out of his shorts. All his friends talked about it. This is not a wacked-out children's reconstruction." That's a volatile combination sure to leave marks on a young boy's psyche, but it's the mother's curse—to say just what it is would steal some of Ellroy's thunder—that really does him in. The author's '50s is not that of Leave It to Beaver—not with Dad and Mom setting the examples. By the time he was 13, Ellroy was chugging cheap wine, peeping into windows and reading deeply into warlock-haunted literature that "formally sanctioned me to lie still and conjure women." Ah, and the women he conjured. There's Susan, who swigged cough syrup and downed stolen pills with him ("we talked classical music shit endlessly"); Charlotte (who "thought I drank too much"); Helen ("I lacked her omnivorous view of the world in all its lively flux. She lacked my brutal will"; and...well, a lot of ands, remembered over half a century in this Nabokovian exercise in time travel, with confessions of vice and addiction and, mostly, half-truths told and believed. It's vintage Ellroy, full of bile and invective and utterly unsparing to anyone—including the author himself, who manages to let slip away most of the good things he finds and spends a few fortunes in the bargain, yet keeps on plugging.

A fervent portrait of the artist as a young screw-up—an old one, too, who writes like an avenging angel.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

September 15, 2010

In his second memoir, Ellroy (L.A. Confidential) attempts to dispel a curse that began with the murder of his mother, Jean Hilliker, when he was ten years old, which is more thoroughly explored in his previous memoir, My Dark Places. His mother's murder came three months after he had wished her dead. That he should have behavioral challenges and issues with guilt is understandable. Ellroy's own curse, readers learn, is his inability to develop stable, long-term, and meaningful relationships with women; he writes here of seeking to dispel that curse. In short, punchy sentences, with lurid detail, Ellroy describes his many--ultimately doomed--relationships and marriages in his search for her, the woman with whom he is destined to be. In the course of his search, he leaves a path of destruction, which, along with his self-realization, is what this book is about. VERDICT Recommended for readers who enjoy introspective, edgy memoirs and for fans of Ellroy.--Mark Alan Williams Manivong, Library of Congress

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2010
Theres no doubt about it: James Ellroy is a fascinating character. Whether you go for his big-dog-howling-at-the-moon shtick or not, hes as hard to ignore as a burning fire truck. As he becomes better known, it becomes harder to separate the man from his booksand this book wont help. His first memoir, My Dark Places (1996), explored the murder of his mother, Jean Hilliker, when he was 10, and the woman-shaped hole in his psyche that he has been falling through ever since. In this short, breathless follow-up, Ellroy attempts to remove The Curse by owning his maternal bloodline and by giving us blow-by-blow accounts of his great loves and losses. At first, the revelations are compelling, as the author indicts the tough-guy persona he has so meticulously constructed. Though told with his customary braggadocio, his obsessiveness and neediness are so well limned that it makes the readers skin crawl. But his new introspection goes only so far: Ellroy sees himself through the heroic lens of a life writ large, his relationships ordained and heaven-sent. And as their number grows, and their duration lessens, our belief in this enterprise weakens. It becomes a more common tale of a big man with a bigger ego (he coins the word Ellrovian) who blows chance after chance at making relationships work. In the end, his insight fails him, and instead of lifting the curse, he seems more in its thrall than ever.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)