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wallflower_bee's review
1.0
talk about some problematic racist and homophobic wording. yikes. also his sexual obsession with his mother is disgusting? like. oh my god. ALSO. not to mention the fact that he literally broke into peoples houses and stole underwear along with peeping in bathroom windows.
cpoole's review against another edition
dark
emotional
informative
mysterious
reflective
tense
medium-paced
3.75
lindseypinzy's review
1.0
This reads like a newspaper article. Short sentences. "Informative" paragraphs. I guess I don't enjoy James Ellroys style of writing... I wanted a story. Not a 450 page report. DNF
bloodonsnow's review
4.0
Half mystery book, half love letter to a dead woman he barely knew, this book is profoundly sad and hopeful. I want to find my biological father now, which I wonder if this book entirely inspired.
jackieeh's review against another edition
4.0
Jean was such a goddamn secretive woman. Her life just didn't make sense.
This is probably more time than I would ordinarily want to spend in James Ellroy's company. I love L.A. Confidential, and I will certainly read more of his fiction, but the whole but-the-author-doesn't-really-think-like-his-characters defense kind of breaks down once you get to know the author. Or does it? The best thing about My Dark Places is that you get to know Ellroy intimately (intimately), but you still don't know what he actually thinks. Or maybe you do, but it would require some serious sifting and analysis. He's spewed it out at one point or another. The man's an actor and a showboat and a liar, and he tells you all that right upfront, alongside the queasy details of his past and the fact that his father was apparently massively well-endowed (but I guess he could have mentioned that another five or six thousand times).
...dead white women were some kind of draw
I'm getting my unease with Ellroy out of the way because I think this book is actually pretty great. It's a raw and disturbing look at an already raw and disturbing event in his life. The beauty of Ellroy's particular nonfiction approach is that he never lets you forget that this is his take on events, even when he's presenting one of the more Just The Facts, Ma'am sections: on the level of language, the story is so him. Short sentences. No graphic details spared. Every slur on the planet used. Truth bombs dropped. Noir atmosphere created. He even acknowledges that his fame rests on violence against women, and the people who want to read about it. That's gross, but I read Ellroy, and so do a lot of other people, so where does that leave us?
She came to me in a book. An innocent gift burned my world down.
It's not like there's a market to be cornered--crime writers who are crime writers because their mothers were murdered and they got obsessed with the Black Dahlia and all LA crime as a result--but if there were, Ellroy would have cornered it with this. He shows pretty compellingly how his mother's death shaped him into the person he is and, even more compellingly, into the writer he is. None of this comes across as forced or exploited. It made perfect sense to me that as a child Ellroy would make a subconscious attempt to connect with his mother through true crime books. It made even more sense that these obsessions would haunt him through his fraught and dangerous teens and twenties (when he also started reading Ross Macdonald, Raymond Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett) until they finally resolved themselves into something workable. All writers might not recognize their own method in Ellroy's sex-heavy fantasies, but I suspect most would relate to that moment of clarity he experiences, upon realizing that one such fantasy is too big to be anything but a novel. This wasn't his physical/medical moment of salvation, but, perhaps, in the words of Frank Sinatra, "you can't have one without the other."
[Detective] Stoner learned that men killed women because the world ignored and condoned it.
Without going into too much detail--because I do recommend this book if you think you can handle it--I will say that the moment this book started to actually add up to something was when Ellroy and Stoner stopped investigating Jean Ellroy's death and started investigating her life. That was when the crime writer got out of his depth, and that was what led to some of his most humane writing yet.
My fear always peaked and diminished. I never quite scared myself all the way back to that night.
shanbro's review
4.0
My Dark Places gets a little tedious by the end, both the writing style and the wheel spinning in regard to Ellroy's mother's case. I wish that more had come from the Jean Ellroy re-investigation, but it's interesting to see all of the other cases profiled and their outcomes (if they managed to catch the perpetrators). There's also a good history of the San Gabriel Valley at the time.
jakewritesbooks's review
4.0
As I said a few weeks ago in my review of This Storm, I recently met James Ellroy at a book signing. I confess to feeling some intimidation. I’ve heard many stories over the years of Ellroy’s abrasive and forward personality in public. I shared in a social media group about getting ready to meet Ellroy and one guy shared a story about him fat shaming a kid at a book signing. Granted, it was hearsay but in line with what I expected.
Anyway, once Ellroy got there, he spoke in his typical rhyming, alliterative patter. It was like he was narrating one of his books to us as a character. And gradually, my nervousness began to fade. Because what I saw in him was someone working through their anxiety. I don’t know James Ellroy from Adam and I’m not a psychiatrist but it was obvious to me. He was nervous and that’s how he dealt with his nervousness.
Once he started meeting fans, he was kind and incredibly gracious with his time. He’d sign anything anyone put in front of him, even if they had multiple copies of his books, and was quite willing to pose for pictures. He and I joked about being Lutheran and we took a photo at the end, which I did not anticipate. I was glad I went.
I share all of this because reading My Dark Places helped me understand more of Ellroy’s personality and why he is who he is. He lived a rough life for a long time. The pawn in the middle of a battle ground between two divorced parents (relatable), he didn’t seem too upset by his mother’s horrific death initially. But this meant he was raised by a man who had no business being a parent. Ellroy’s father’s lack of parental oversight sent the younger Ellroy on a downward spiral from which he was fortunate to recover from. And he has lived a monastic life since, which helps keep him from temptation.
What I appreciated about this book, and by extension its author, is how raw and honest Ellroy is about his life. Nothing is out of bounds, including many psychosexual things that probably should have been. He writes it just like he writes a typical Ellroy tale: fully targeting its subject and completely devoid of any sentimentality. The verbiage he uses to describe himself could just as easily be used to describe any LA lowlife from his novels.
As he gets older and decides to follow up on his mother’s murder, Ellroy is able to meld his trademark style of crime solving with the importance of the personal journey he undertook. It makes for compelling reading, particularly the end, when he stares down a large revelation that brings his entire story into focus.
If you’re an Ellroy fan, you have to read this. It reads like his own book and it gives you a clear picture of what makes the man, for better and for worse.
Anyway, once Ellroy got there, he spoke in his typical rhyming, alliterative patter. It was like he was narrating one of his books to us as a character. And gradually, my nervousness began to fade. Because what I saw in him was someone working through their anxiety. I don’t know James Ellroy from Adam and I’m not a psychiatrist but it was obvious to me. He was nervous and that’s how he dealt with his nervousness.
Once he started meeting fans, he was kind and incredibly gracious with his time. He’d sign anything anyone put in front of him, even if they had multiple copies of his books, and was quite willing to pose for pictures. He and I joked about being Lutheran and we took a photo at the end, which I did not anticipate. I was glad I went.
I share all of this because reading My Dark Places helped me understand more of Ellroy’s personality and why he is who he is. He lived a rough life for a long time. The pawn in the middle of a battle ground between two divorced parents (relatable), he didn’t seem too upset by his mother’s horrific death initially. But this meant he was raised by a man who had no business being a parent. Ellroy’s father’s lack of parental oversight sent the younger Ellroy on a downward spiral from which he was fortunate to recover from. And he has lived a monastic life since, which helps keep him from temptation.
What I appreciated about this book, and by extension its author, is how raw and honest Ellroy is about his life. Nothing is out of bounds, including many psychosexual things that probably should have been. He writes it just like he writes a typical Ellroy tale: fully targeting its subject and completely devoid of any sentimentality. The verbiage he uses to describe himself could just as easily be used to describe any LA lowlife from his novels.
As he gets older and decides to follow up on his mother’s murder, Ellroy is able to meld his trademark style of crime solving with the importance of the personal journey he undertook. It makes for compelling reading, particularly the end, when he stares down a large revelation that brings his entire story into focus.
If you’re an Ellroy fan, you have to read this. It reads like his own book and it gives you a clear picture of what makes the man, for better and for worse.
nephilimitless's review
2.0
What a sincerely unlikeable person. I still want the murder to be solved, but I don't want to read Ellroy's writing about it anymore. Short sentences ("telegraphese") and a lot of needless shock value. An absolute slog until the last 5% of the book, in which there's an anti-climax, unsurprisingly.