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  • Published: 1 August 2011
  • ISBN: 9780099537854
  • Imprint: Windmill Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $24.99

The Hilliker Curse

My Pursuit of Women




A raw, explicit memoir as high-intensity and riveting as any of Ellroy's novels. The theme: the author's obsessive pursuit of women.

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.

  • Published: 1 August 2011
  • ISBN: 9780099537854
  • Imprint: Windmill Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $24.99

About the author

James Ellroy

James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He is the author of the acclaimed 'L.A. Quartet': The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential and White Jazz. His novel Blood's A Rover completes the magisterial 'Underworld USA Trilogy' - the first two volumes of which (American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand) were both Sunday Times bestsellers. His last novel Widespread Panic received wide praise, with The Times calling it 'extraordinary'.

Also by James Ellroy

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Praise for The Hilliker Curse

A remarkable memoir ... Hugely enjoyable

The Economist

We turn the pages gripped with a rubbernecker's fascination ... It is ugly, beautiful, reprehensible and moving. In other words, a hard book to forget

Irish Times

High-octane ... A breathless piece of writing ... When it comes to pinning down the most startling possible word collision, Ellroy's acrobatic pizzazz is beyond doubt ... This is literary knife-throwing at its most exhilarating and dangerous

Julie Myerson, Guardian

A painfully honest book, written in Ellroy's usual blunt, breathless but often starkly beautiful prose ... a marvellous read, sly, self-mocking and filled with troubling insight

Time Out

James Ellroy's crime novels have been much acclaimed for their dark plots, tough prose and generally bleak view of the world. Now that he's brought those same qualities to bear on a history of his relationships with women, the result, inevitably, is not for the faint-hearted ... Ellroy writes with such swagger and certainty that it's hard not to be swept along. He also - let's face it - has quite a tale to tell

Daily Mail

The latest from this American literary legend is a stark rendition of murder, nervous breakdown, affairs, divorces and much more. It's an incredibly frank and soul-bearing piece of writing which goes some way to explaining the extreme and obsessive nature of Ellroy's brilliant novels

Big Issue

Riveting ... this is the most addictive of reads about life, love and self-discovery, in astonishing, soul-baring detail. An unforgettable autobiography

Red Magazine

This latest book is Ellroy’s most intimate and personal . . . It’s forceful and unsparing in its revelations . . . [His sentences] make you grateful to read his prose, with its marvelous fury, passion and energy. They also compel you to keep rooting for him

San Francisco Chronicle

Crime writer James Ellroy’s most compelling mystery story has always been his own . . . But "The Hilliker Curse" is not meant to be merely a confession. It is an act of creation . . . There’s a truth of feeling in it, too, an underlying sense of what it is actually like to live in the vortex of an impossible yearning . . . Ellroy is expert and relentless at dramatizing the effects [of his obsession]

Wall Street Journal

As fascinating as it is at times utterly disturbing

Entertainment Weekly