My Dark Places, by James Ellroy

Whew. This book was compelling, but exhausting. In the last few months, I have read a recent non-fiction account of the Black Dahlia murder, re-read Ellroy's own Dahlia novel, and saw the movie over the weekend. One of my fellow New Year's Eve revelers told me about My Dark Places, so I put it on my hold list at the library (more on that later) and just finished it yesterday.

It's a pretty dark memoir of his life, changed forever after the unsolved murder of his mother when he was a boy. Convincing himself that he was happy to be away from his drunk, whore mother, he lived with the father he idolized. He led a pretty dissolute existence until his late twenties, when he nearly went mad from drugs and drink. His temporary descent into madness shook him out of it, and he eventually became a critically acclaimed novelist.

In the 90s, he realized how much his mother's death affected him and began to work with a detective to unravel what actually happened. The retelling of their quest sometimes gets a little tedious, with long lists of people who weren't able to tell them anything, and places then visited to learn nothing. But they put together little pieces of her life, and that helped him to come to terms with it, on some level.

The most interesting part of the book to me, given my mild fascination with the Black Dahlia case, is how his mother's murder got twisted up in his mind with the Dahlia and other murders during his child- and young adult-hood. It's a little creepy, and very disturbing, but totally fascinating.