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Title details for The Hilliker Curse by James Ellroy - Available

The Hilliker Curse

My Pursuit of Women

by James Ellroy
James Ellroy
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
The legendary 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 after 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 on the power of malediction, and above all, a cri de cœur. James 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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Awards

  • Release date

    September 7, 2010

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780307875884
      • File size: 222527 KB
      • Duration: 07:43:35

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      James Ellroy is a great crime fiction writer, but what made him think he could write a book that deals with his own sexual frustrations? And, more importantly, what made him decide to read it himself? The book is odd. Short declaratory sentences. Written chronologically about his obsession to find the perfect woman. Too much time spent on his creepy oedipal issues. Ellroy shouts like a televangelist or a late-night television pitchman. He accentuates or draws out words and phrases, making each sound important, whether it is or not. "WE ARE RIDDDIIING IN THE CAAAAAARRRRR," he shouts. This book is better read than heard. He talks a little too frankly about his sexual problems with women, but not in a funny way--more like an uncomfortable conversation with a drunken stranger. Please return to crime novels. M.S. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      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.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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