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The Hilliker Curse
- My Pursuit of Women
- Narrated by: James Ellroy
- Length: 7 hrs and 43 mins
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The Hilliker Curse
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Publisher's Summary
The legendary 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 10 years old. He hated and lusted after 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 on the power of malediction, and above all, a cri de cœur. James 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 listened to.
What the critics say
"As fascinating as it is at times utterly disturbing." (Entertainment Weekly)
"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)
"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)