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3.09 AVERAGE
3.09 AVERAGE
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Dig. James Ellroy is a fucked up man. I don’t think he’d mind me saying that. I think he’d agree with me, and appreciate the attention that comes with the acknowledgement.
This is a memoir, and an unofficial sequel to his previous award winning and classic first memoir “My Dark Places.”
“My Dark Places” tells us the story about the murder of his mother when he was nine and the devastating impact that had on him psychologically. In it, he describes his experience, hiring a retired police detective to help try to solve his mother‘s unsolved murder to no avail. He claims in the end that the attempt brings him peace and closes a chapter of decades of trauma. I don’t know what degree he lied to us there, but with this memoir, it’s apparent he may have lied to himself.
In this compact but intense book, just over 200 pages, Ellroy goes into even greater detail of his mental health after his mother‘s murder. There is no doubt that wishing your mother dead at age 9, and her coincidentally being murdered within four months of that is going to mess with somebody’s head in any number of ways. James Ellroy is deeply scarred from the experience. And after his father‘s death, it only gets worse: homelessness, drug use, PTSD, and an incredibly unhealthy obsession with women. Particularly women who may resemble his mother.
I’ll let him tell you the details but beyond outlining the litany trauma, Ellroy talks about how his trauma has negatively impact his relationship with particularly for women in his life whom he loved and turned, they tried to love him.
This is one of my all-time favorite authors, and I walk away from this book with that unchanged. To say, however, it has changed how I feel about Ellroy, the man behind the storytelling, is an understatement.
There is no doubt that the author got some sort of catharsis in writing this memoir and publishing it, but if every word in this is true, Ellroy is somebody – – particularly if you’re a woman – – is a sociopath that should be avoided at all cost.
A fascinating but uncomfortable read for even the most loyal fans, which I believe I am, I would be very curious to know what someone who has never read his work before would think after reading this memoir.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Addiction, Alcoholism, Panic attacks/disorders, Self harm, Sexism, Toxic relationship, Stalking, Toxic friendship
Moderate: Ableism, Cancer, Misogyny
Minor: Classism
Weeping-Jesus-on-the-cross, what sort of wayward trip was that? I suppose blazing through such in one sitting is the ideal route, but I am left here shaking my head and searching for ashes in my mouth.
A masterclass in mother issues and how to ruin relationships. This is the first James Ellroy I'd read and once I'd got used to the staccato writing style and gumshoe tone it was an enjoyable read by an author I had only a passing knowledge of.
Pleasant enough if not something that will remain memorable. I enjoyed the telling of at times an angst ridden selfish tale in a way that remained interesting without being irritating. I felt absolutely no connection to Ellroy himself in the memoir or to any of the women but would recommend it as something to potter through that won't change your life.
Pleasant enough if not something that will remain memorable. I enjoyed the telling of at times an angst ridden selfish tale in a way that remained interesting without being irritating. I felt absolutely no connection to Ellroy himself in the memoir or to any of the women but would recommend it as something to potter through that won't change your life.
I love memoirs, and I used to love Ellroy. If this wasn't written by him it would not have gotten published, and I would not have read it.
When he is straight forward telling the stories of the loves in his life (and infatuations) the story hooked me in. But then he starts talking about Her and She and US and Them and The Curse - and Beethoven (well, he just kind of drops the name a lot, never really explaining why or what he loves about the music so much).
Ellroy is a auto-didactic mystery writer. This memoir screams out that he wants to be taken as a Serious Writer with Serious Ideas. It doesn't close the sale.
For as much as I enjoyed parts of it, most of it had me screaming to myself, "Is this shitty little 203 page memoir done yet? Can I put it on the Goodwill pile yet?????" Published in 2010, here's betting that the last woman/She/Her/Them or the book, Erika, hasn't lasted either.
Do yourself a favor and go back and read The LA Quartet and his books before those, and leave this on the B&N overstock table........
When he is straight forward telling the stories of the loves in his life (and infatuations) the story hooked me in. But then he starts talking about Her and She and US and Them and The Curse - and Beethoven (well, he just kind of drops the name a lot, never really explaining why or what he loves about the music so much).
Ellroy is a auto-didactic mystery writer. This memoir screams out that he wants to be taken as a Serious Writer with Serious Ideas. It doesn't close the sale.
For as much as I enjoyed parts of it, most of it had me screaming to myself, "Is this shitty little 203 page memoir done yet? Can I put it on the Goodwill pile yet?????" Published in 2010, here's betting that the last woman/She/Her/Them or the book, Erika, hasn't lasted either.
Do yourself a favor and go back and read The LA Quartet and his books before those, and leave this on the B&N overstock table........
I don't altogether know why I even finished this. It's miles from being as well written and deep as Ellroy thinks it is, though I suppose I appreciate his willingness to dig deep and disclose candidly the ugliest things about himself. Yet by the end even that seemed rote and practised, the same way his jivin' hep-cat lingo had gone well-beyond tiresome by thirty or forty pages in. I understand he believes he's the finest writer living today, but I wish he imagined that a fine writer could vary the length and structure of his sentences to give a more varied portrait of people, their mental states, and the situations in which they find themselves. By the end I couldn't wait for this book to be over, and I suspect it'll be the last Ellroy I read.
Why does there always have to be a sex memoir?
That's the primary thought that will go for your head for the first 40 or so pages of the slim and easily read memoir from the Demon Dog.
After that, however, it does turn its gaze from lurid bedroom exploits to the tortured, tortured mind of the author. In case you hadn't read My Dark Places before this one, James Ellroy's mother was murdered when he was 9 years old and it might have messed him up in the head just a little bit. My Dark Places was a pretty grim memoir that detailed a lot of his trauma, this work goes even further and actively makes me wonder how he has managed to have such an illustrious career with all these ghosts in his brain.
The middle section is the most engaging and insightful into Ellroy himself, and details the difficult, post LA Confidential adaptation, part of his life. Trying to top his masterpiece American Tabloid while his marriage disintegrates. He never says it, but Ellroy almost certainly has some form of OCD and suffers a mental breakdown. The description of which are suffocating and convey his agony well.
The rest of the book, was still engaging but significantly less so since you see him make the same mistakes he made earlier in his life again and again. There are also fewer insights into his works, aside from hints at film and TV projects that never materialized.
There was a surprising amount of ink given to his early, pre LA Quartet novels. He trashes them, but I actually really enjoyed them and enjoyed hearing more about their birth.
All in all, I would only recommend this for Ellroy fanatics like myself. My Dark Places works as a literature and as a memoir, but The Hilliker Curse is only for those who want salacious news about the author.
It is rather funny that Ellroy's predictions all came to nothing in the end. The woman he decribes as HER and his salvation ended their relationship not long after The Hilliker Curse came out; he's now back with his 2nd wife, novelist Helen Knode.
That's the primary thought that will go for your head for the first 40 or so pages of the slim and easily read memoir from the Demon Dog.
After that, however, it does turn its gaze from lurid bedroom exploits to the tortured, tortured mind of the author. In case you hadn't read My Dark Places before this one, James Ellroy's mother was murdered when he was 9 years old and it might have messed him up in the head just a little bit. My Dark Places was a pretty grim memoir that detailed a lot of his trauma, this work goes even further and actively makes me wonder how he has managed to have such an illustrious career with all these ghosts in his brain.
The middle section is the most engaging and insightful into Ellroy himself, and details the difficult, post LA Confidential adaptation, part of his life. Trying to top his masterpiece American Tabloid while his marriage disintegrates. He never says it, but Ellroy almost certainly has some form of OCD and suffers a mental breakdown. The description of which are suffocating and convey his agony well.
The rest of the book, was still engaging but significantly less so since you see him make the same mistakes he made earlier in his life again and again. There are also fewer insights into his works, aside from hints at film and TV projects that never materialized.
There was a surprising amount of ink given to his early, pre LA Quartet novels. He trashes them, but I actually really enjoyed them and enjoyed hearing more about their birth.
All in all, I would only recommend this for Ellroy fanatics like myself. My Dark Places works as a literature and as a memoir, but The Hilliker Curse is only for those who want salacious news about the author.
It is rather funny that Ellroy's predictions all came to nothing in the end. The woman he decribes as HER and his salvation ended their relationship not long after The Hilliker Curse came out; he's now back with his 2nd wife, novelist Helen Knode.
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
tense
slow-paced
You either like him or you don't.
I, like the author, made the mistake of assuming his real life would be as entertaining as his fiction. This book is self-indulgent and boring.
I've never been a fan of James Ellroy's noir-tinged novels set in post-war Los Angeles. He's got the hard-boiled patter down, but the stories never felt real. Twenty years ago, however, he wrote a book about his mother and, despite the unrelenting patois, the book sizzles with dysfunction and a reconciliation forever lost. In My Dark Places, Ellroy revisits his mother's murder from the direction of a cold case. He'd been ten years old at the time, his parents were divorced and his relationship with his mother was not great. He had wished her dead just three months earlier. My Dark Places is an amazing book. It's not particularly well-written, Ellroy can't leave the detective magazine lingo behind and refers to his mother, somewhat disconcertingly, as the Redhead throughout the book, but it resonates with emotion and regret.
The Hilliker Curse is his follow-up memoir and in it he attributes his string of failed relationships to his abruptly truncated relationship with his mother. He's not without self-awareness, something that is usually missing in books about infidelity: I always get what I want. I more often than not suffocate or discard what I want the most. It cuts me loose to yearn and profitably repeat the pattern. He's selfish to an astonishing degree, driven, self-obsessed and deeply religious (the justifications for breaking up marriages, his own and those of the women he meets are a little shaky).
Ellroy begins with his own parents' marriage. They divorced when he was young, or as Ellroy put it: My parents split the sheets later that year. Jean Hilliker got primary custody. She put my dad on skates and rolled him to a cheap pad a few blocks away. Ellroy's father gets him back after his mother's murder, but isn't what could be even loosely termed a good father. Ellroy ends up in a wretched basement apartment, hooked on Benzedrex inhalers and any pills he finds in the Hancock Park homes he breaks into. He has, not surprisingly, trouble finding a girl willing to go out with him.
Surprisingly, Ellroy's odd pulp-fiction language serves this book well. It would just be too intense without the distance of obsolete idioms. He gets clean, using AA as a support and a place to meet women: Only lonely and haunted women would grok my gravity. They were sister misfits attuned to my wavelength. Only they grooved internal discourse and sex as sanctified flame. Their soiled souls were socked in sync with yours truly.
As Ellroy's fortunes improve, it becomes more apparent what an ass he is. All the heavy lifting in relationships is done by his partners. When married, he does not do any domestic chores, but needs to eat well and live in nice surroundings. He prefers solitude with his partner of the moment and so discourages any sort of social life in his wives. He hates other places. Amsterdam is described as Truly Shitsville and he leaves sightseeing in Paris for the geeks, freaks and fruitcake artistes.
What saves this book in the end is Ellroy's honesty and a sense of fair play toward the women in his life. The relationships may have all soured, but he's willing to put the blame squarely on his own shoulders, and even figures out toward the end that his mother was not the bad guy in his story.
The Hilliker Curse is his follow-up memoir and in it he attributes his string of failed relationships to his abruptly truncated relationship with his mother. He's not without self-awareness, something that is usually missing in books about infidelity: I always get what I want. I more often than not suffocate or discard what I want the most. It cuts me loose to yearn and profitably repeat the pattern. He's selfish to an astonishing degree, driven, self-obsessed and deeply religious (the justifications for breaking up marriages, his own and those of the women he meets are a little shaky).
Ellroy begins with his own parents' marriage. They divorced when he was young, or as Ellroy put it: My parents split the sheets later that year. Jean Hilliker got primary custody. She put my dad on skates and rolled him to a cheap pad a few blocks away. Ellroy's father gets him back after his mother's murder, but isn't what could be even loosely termed a good father. Ellroy ends up in a wretched basement apartment, hooked on Benzedrex inhalers and any pills he finds in the Hancock Park homes he breaks into. He has, not surprisingly, trouble finding a girl willing to go out with him.
Surprisingly, Ellroy's odd pulp-fiction language serves this book well. It would just be too intense without the distance of obsolete idioms. He gets clean, using AA as a support and a place to meet women: Only lonely and haunted women would grok my gravity. They were sister misfits attuned to my wavelength. Only they grooved internal discourse and sex as sanctified flame. Their soiled souls were socked in sync with yours truly.
As Ellroy's fortunes improve, it becomes more apparent what an ass he is. All the heavy lifting in relationships is done by his partners. When married, he does not do any domestic chores, but needs to eat well and live in nice surroundings. He prefers solitude with his partner of the moment and so discourages any sort of social life in his wives. He hates other places. Amsterdam is described as Truly Shitsville and he leaves sightseeing in Paris for the geeks, freaks and fruitcake artistes.
What saves this book in the end is Ellroy's honesty and a sense of fair play toward the women in his life. The relationships may have all soured, but he's willing to put the blame squarely on his own shoulders, and even figures out toward the end that his mother was not the bad guy in his story.
It seems that it was so similar to his previous books I had the feeling that I had read it before.