Featured on The Book Show on Sky Arts on 14 October 2010.
A candid and sometimes shocking memoir from one of the greatest thriller writers of the last century. Ellroy's obsessive relationship with his mother is laid bare giving us a fascinating insight in tot he mind of the author and the past that has influenced all his writing.
In 2011 James Ellroy was awarded the French Order of Arts and Letters by France's culture minister Frederic Mitterand. Mitterand described Ellroy as "the master of dark dreams" and called him "one of the most prominent names in modern literature".
Ellroy's editor at William Heinemann, Jason Arthur, said: "If the purpose of this honour is to recognise a significant contribution to literature, then it is richly deserved. It reaffirms my belief that his writing truly transcends genre and easy labels—James is quite simply one of the best novelists writing today."
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 cuur. 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.
James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He is the author of the acclaimed LA Quartet, The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential and White Jazz, as well as the first two parts of his Underworld USA trilogy, American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand which were both Sunday Times bestsellers.
In 2011 James Ellroy was awarded the French Order of Arts and Letters by France's culture minister Frederic Mitterand. Mitterand described Ellroy as "the master of dark dreams" and called him "one of the most prominent names in modern literature".
Ellroy's editor at William Heinemann, Jason Arthur, said: "If the purpose of this honour is to recognise a significant contribution to literature, then it is richly deserved. It reaffirms my belief that his writing truly transcends genre and easy labels—James is quite simply one of the best novelists writing today."
