The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women by James Ellroy

This is a second memoir from Ellroy, following My Dark Places in 1996. I'm a fan of his L.A. noir crime novels; My Dark Places was a pretty fascinating investigation into Ellroy's childhood and his mother's murder when he was 10, something that's strongly shaped the rest of his life.

Hilliker was Ellroy's mother's maiden name, and the curse is that three months before her murder, he wished her dead during a big argument. He believes at some deep-down level that he's gotten what he wants in life at the cost of his mother's life.

A lot of this memoir retreads the same ground as My Dark Places, retailing Ellroy's creepy adolescence as a window peeper, shoplifter, and compulsive masturbator. And Ellroy's adulthood--even with him cleaned up, rich, and famous--is just as creepy.

It turns out that he spends most of non-work life holed up in dark rooms, listening to music and fantasizing about women. Sometimes they're real women; sometimes it's a woman he saw briefly once somewhere, and has constructed a whole fantasy around. Often they are, like his dead mother, tall and red-haired. On a book tour through Europe, he yanks the drapes shut in his Paris or Rome hotel room, turns off the lights, and "broods," because travel is stupid and boring compared to fantasizing.

Such arrogance always lies alongside Ellroy's frequent acknowledgements of being unlikeable, uncouth, selfish, and so on. He presents these qualities as if they have nothing to do with him, anymore than eye color or height.

He often talks about wanting to "contain" the women in his life (real or fantasy) and his fantasies overwhelmingly involve rescuing these women. It doesn't take Freud to see how this all connects back to his mother, to yearning for her and guilt for her. It also seems obvious that the one he wants contained is himself, all curled up in the dark as he is, in another of his womb-like rooms.

Ellroy is a talented novelist, but reading this book becomes increasingly creepy--and also just plain boring. For all the huge drama he puts around his obsessions, they never change. The next woman is always Her.