A review by jackieeh
My Dark Places: An L.A. Crime Memoir by James Ellroy

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.