The Hilliker Curse, by James Ellroy (Knopf; $24.95)

I don’t often read memoirs. But I picked up Ellroy’s latest because I have always been interested in his backstory. Briefly, his mother was murdered in the late 50s, and the crime was never solved. As an adult, he hired a homicide cop to try to solve the case, but he never found the killer. I’ve also enjoyed some of his books, particularly The Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential.  But some of his other books were pretentious and nearly unintelligible. Those books, along with The Hilliker Curse’s subtitle of My Pursuit of Women, should have been a warning to proceed carefully. But nothing, nothing could have prepared me for the total crazy self-absorption that is this book. 

The plot, in short, is this: Ellroy’s parents divorced when he was about 8 years old. He lived with his mother, Jean Hilliker, who started drinking and sleeping around fairly openly. Jean tells her little boy that his father has been peeping in their windows, watching her with other men.  The younger Ellroy starts peeping in his neighborhood, graduating to breaking and entering the homes of wealthy young women. Eventually, Jean Hilliker asks the now teenaged James if he’d rather live with his father, and hits him when he says yes. He curses her, and she was murdered three months later, “at the apex of my hatred and equally burning lust.”

And so begins a downward spiral of alcohol, drugs, and bottoming-out that, amazingly, didn’t kill him. Instead, he became a writer, achieving no small amount of success. Had that been the end of the story, it would have been a Hallmark Hall of Fame holiday special. But the hook here is Ellroy is obsessed with absolutely everything: a woman named Marcia Sidwell who spoke kindly to him in a laundromat back in 1973; Beethoven; Anne Sofie von Otter; his salivary glands. He works like a dervish, he cuts his skin to release the cancer that isn’t there, he breaks down. 

The overriding element here is sex, rooted in his feelings for his mama.  “Jean Hilliker and I comprise a love story,” he writes.  “It was born of shameful lust and shaped by the power of malediction. Our ending was not and could never be the apprehension of a killer and a treatise on the victim-killer nexus. My precocious sexuality pre-shaped The Curse and preordained the resolution as my overweening desire for women.” The question for me was why any woman, including those he married, returned this desire. He just sounds like a guy with an interesting history who has turned into a dreadful bore.

I’d be lying if I said that I don’t like his writing style: I do. He calls it “loony language loops,” and I can’t find a better way to describe it. It’s rhythmic and staccato and beautiful in its own idiosyncratic way. I’m not sure, though, that, having read this memoir, I’ll ever be able to read another of his novels without feeling a vague ickiness.