"My Dark Places" by James Ellroy is a memoir that delves into the author's own childhood, focusing on his mother's unsolved murder and his quest to find the true culprit many years later. Ellroy intricately weaves a narrative that reads like fiction, revealing haunting truths about his past in a brutally honest fashion. The book combines elements of a true crime investigation with a personal confession, offering insights into the dark and violent art that shapes Ellroy's literary obsessions.
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Sensitive Topics/Content Warnings
Content warnings include discussions of murder, drug and alcohol addiction, childhood trauma, violence, and potentially triggering themes related to grief and loss.
From The Publisher:
The internationally acclaimed author of the L.A. Quartet and The Underworld USA Trilogy, James Ellroy, presents another literary masterpiece, this time a true crime murder mystery about his own mother.
In 1958 Jean Ellroy was murdered, her body dumped on a roadway in a seedy L.A. suburb. Her killer was never found, and the police dismissed her as a casualty of a cheap Saturday night. James Ellroy was ten when his mother died, and he spent the next thirty-six years running from her ghost and attempting to exorcize it through crime fiction. In 1994, Ellroy quit running. He went back to L.A., to find out the truth about his mother-and himself.
In My Dark Places, our most uncompromising crime writer tells what happened when he teamed up with a brilliant homicide cop to investigate a murder that everyone else had forgotten-and reclaim the mother he had despised, desired, but never dared to love. What ensues is a epic of loss, fixation, and redemption, a memoir that is also a history of the American way of violence.
"Ellroy is more powerful than ever."
-The Nation
"Astonishing . . . original, daring, brilliant."
-Philadelphia Inquirer
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About the Author:
JAMES ELLROY was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He is the author of the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy: American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood's A Rover, and the L.A. Quartet novels: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz. He lives in Colorado.
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