The Hilliker Curse

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.