Dimensions
143 x 222 x 24mm
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'. Three months later, she was murdered. The Hilliker Curse is a predator's confession, a treatise on guilt and the power of malediction, and above all a cri de coeur. Ellroy single-mindedly seeks 'atonement in women'. He unsparingly describes his shattered childhood, his delinquent teens, his writing life, his love affairs and marriages, a nervous breakdown and the beginning of a relationship with an extraordinary woman who may just be the long-sought Her. It is a layered narrative of time and place, emotion and insight, sexuality and spiritual quest. And all of it is reported with a gut-wrenching and heart-rending candour. The Hilliker Curse is a brilliant and soul-baring revelation of self. It is unlike any memoir you have ever read before.