Ellroy bares soul in ‘Hilliker Curse’ memoir

Reading James Ellroy’s new memoir, “The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women,” is like watching a big train wreck unfold: It’s terrible, exhilarating, exhausting, entertaining and downright tragic.

It’s also brutally honest in its portrayal of personal and family relationships and how they can brighten — or ruin — someone’s life. It reveals how someone can overcome a troubled upbringing and still be haunted by its ghosts decades later.

Only someone like Ellroy, who wrote the aptly titled memoir “My Dark Places” in the 1990s, would have the courage and the audacity to write something as soul-baring as “The Hilliker Curse.” Ellroy is the best-selling author of the L.A. Quartet series (including “The Black Dahlia” and “L.A. Confidential”) and the more recent Underworld USA Trilogy (“American Tabloid,” “The Cold Six Thousand” and last year’s “Blood’s A Rover”).

Of course, what would an Ellroy book be without rough language and disturbing images? His new memoir has them, but they last only about 200 pages. If Ellroy had his way, the book's subtitle might read "My (expletive) Pursuit of (expletive) Women.” And what a pursuit it was … and still is.

In 1958, when Ellroy was 10, his mother, Jean, divorced her husband after a strife-filled marriage of 10 years and took her maiden name of Hilliker. Both parents had a history of rocky relationships, which foreshadowed a gloomy future for Ellroy. Shockingly, Jean Hilliker was murdered a few months after the divorce in what remains an unsolved case.

This sent the young Ellroy into a tailspin, hence the “Hilliker curse.” He was a delinquent teen, moved around a lot and eventually fell into a writing career. His relationships with females, too numerous to count, never lasted long. His first marriage, based on the East Coast, died after a few years. His second, to Helen, lasted about 15 years.

They had a strong marriage — for a while. They had a lot in common, including a passion for writing. She was a published writer, too. But he hit it big as an author during the marriage and was gone frequently on book tours. This strained the marriage, and then Ellroy suffered a nervous breakdown and had to retreat to their home in Kansas City.

“I stayed in the house,” writes Ellroy. “I froze out the heat and draped out the light. I walked from room to room, jittered and stuporous. Jaunts outside tore me up. I saw children with their toys and pets and started weeping. All my compartments had crumbled. Everything I’d pushed out rushed straight in. I was 53 years old. It was the sum total of a life lived at warp speed … I ran from the marriage.”

They eventually divorced. Since then, Ellroy has had some romantic encounters with women, including one with Joan. They talked about having a child, since Ellroy has never had one. But the relationship floundered, and now he has found Erika, a divorced mother of two daughters.

“I reject this woman as anything less than God’s greatest gift to me,” Ellroy writes. “Her great love emboldens me and cuts through my fear and rage.”

His passionate, obsessive hunt for “atonement in women” may be coming to an end. Let’s hope so because “The Hilliker Curse” isn’t a nice bedtime story. It’s a rough-and-tumble treatise into the life of a man who has had more than his fair share of ups and downs. May God bless his soul.