The New York Times bestselling crime writer and author of The Black Dahlia and L.A. Confidential gives us a searing, candid memoir about his obsession with women, his related search for atonement, and his remarkable literary career. • “Forceful and unsparing in its revelations.... Marvelous fury, passion and energy.” —San Francisco Chronicle

The year was 1958. Jean Hilliker had divorced her hustler husband and resurrected her maiden name. Her son, James, was ten years old. In a dark moment, he “summoned her dead.” Three months later she was murdered. The curse was evoked, and James Ellroy began his unending pursuit of women. Here, he 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 startling revelation, a treatise on guilt and the power of malediction, and above all, a heartfelt confession, The Hilliker Curse is a brilliant, soul-baring revelation of self.