Our Dark Places

I had a bad dream night before last. It was one of those dreams that is particularly annoying because I was terrified in the dream but then, when I tried to tell someone about it, it sounded totally stupid. In the dream my mouth was full of terrible things — broken things and pieces of metal and I kept taking them out of my mouth and more came in. Lots of metal and in it was a lot of jewelry that I have lost over the years, earrings and bracelets and pins that I didn’t even know I still remembered. And, in the dream, there was a part of my mind that kept thinking, I hope I’m dreaming, I hope this is just a dream, it’s so awful, please make it be a dream. And then I woke up scared and shaking.

I never know what causes dreams — usually my own make no sense to me. But one thing was that I had stayed up much too late the night before reading a book that was a 400+ page chronicle of a living nightmare. I am not the sort of person who likes books about brutal lives and devastating childhoods and all that addiction and recovery stuff but this one is different because it is written by a man whose work I know and respect.

The first James Ellroy book I read was The Black Dahlia. Ellroy is a powerful writer with a noir-hip street talk way of writing that sounds like Mickey Spillane and Dashiell Hammett with contemporary sensibilities. He wrote LA Confidential and a number of other pow-pow, tough-guy crime novels but his memoir My Dark Places is a work of genius. It is genius because it is brutally honest about his own interior landscape and how that has driven his life.

At the age of 10 Ellroy was a mixed up kid living a life divided between his divorced parents. His mother was a quiet, secretive but educated loner. His father was a big-talking, gregarious bullshit artist whom his son was deeply influenced by. That year, while he was spending the weekend with his father, his mother got dolled up on a Saturday night and went out for a few drinks. The next morning her raped and strangled body was found in some bushes. The killer was never found.

Ellroy had a tough life. His father died when he was seventeen and he spent over a decade abusing any substance that came his way, living in parks and garages and alleys. Then he wrote a book. And another book. And another book. By the age of forty-five he was living in Connecticut and was a successful author with a couple book sales to the movies — but he was still haunted by the death of the mother he never really knew much about. He went back to California to see what he could find.

This is a tough book to read but is made worthwhile by the fact that Ellroy is such a strong writer and because his writing is completely devoid of self-pity. Rather it is a journey of endless revelation including the brutally honest and somewhat shocking recounting of his sexual obsession with his pre-adolescent fantasies about the mother who died a brutal, sexually-charged death that left her son powerless to outgrow a boy’s normal oedipal-phase. His lifetime obsession with “the redhead”, his fantasy name for his mother, is told honestly and without apology. I think it is one of the most honest books I have ever read — and that is both remarkable and frightening.

It takes a lot of courage to be a writer. You have to keep challenging yourself to be real, and more real, and even more real. Even if you write fiction ---- especially if you write fiction. Ellroy writes great fiction. Once you read My Dark Places, you know why.

Thanks for reading.