My Dark Places (1996)
by James Ellroy

I’ve never previously read anything by James Ellroy, which is (to me at least) slightly surprising given that some of his most famous books are directly about Los Angeles (”L.A. Quartet”: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz). But he is one of those authors I always figured I’d get to, and so I have.

I have begun my descent into L.A. crime writing with his non-fiction book about the murder of his mother, Jean Ellroy, which occurred in El Monte in 1958.

The book is divided into four parts, similar to the various-points-of-view style that is so popular in postmodern writing. (If we can’t know the whole story as it’s reflected in postmodernism’s broken mirror, we can at least try to know as many facets of it as possible.) This version of that style is different since My Dark Places non-fiction and a memoir (i.e. written by an author with some first-hand experience and some second-hand knowledge, all stored in memory not in the present).

Ellroy comes at the story indirectly and directly from different angles in different styles. The first section is “just the facts.” It lays out the crime, what’s known and unknown, police reports, autopsy reports, witness interviews, etc. The second section is a dive into biographical memory. It’s Ellroy’s story from when the murder took place (he was 10) until he became a writer. It has that romanticized tinge that memories get. Everything in his life that happened after his mother relates back to her life or death. And he recalls things sometimes in such detail that I can’t imagine the memory has not be tampered with either as he’s writing or somewhere along the way. Surely the true memory is a scrawny half-fed thing at this point. (Or do the people who tend to write memoirs truly remember things so clearly? Maybe there’s a correlation, a memory gene that means you’re going to be a writer and that you’re going to remember your whole life clearly and cogently.) The next section jumps entirely away from Jean Ellroy and relates the history of the detective who (we don’t know it yet) will come to help James in his quest for his mother. The last section is that quest—the quest for the truth about her death and for the truth about her life, Ellroy’s attempt to walk away from the 10-year-old’s view of his mother and to walk toward the true woman.

The book is part memoir, part journalism, part psychology, part sociology, part history, part fantasy. It analyzes gender relationships, family relationships, the development of an adolescent boy post-trauma, the ability and failure of memory, crime in relation to all these things, Los Angeles as home, Los Angeles as a place where crimes are committed, how people end up where they do, etc.

So, though I still don’t know his fiction (except second-hand through the movie version of L.A. Confidential), I would recommend this book if any of the above topics appeal to you. And I can say that Ellroy at least appears to be a talented writer who knows his way in and out of and around words—concise, clear, and still at times stylistic—a skill always much appreciated by this reader.

three side notes to self:

• how he assumes people can understand where he’s coming from: “He said I was scared. He didn’t elaborate. He didn’t have to. He knew my mother made me unique. He knew I embraced her selfishly.” (326) Can he really explain it to anyone? Does the book work? Is that what it’s for?
• “O.J. Simpson was acquitted. L.A. waxed apocalyptic. The media went nuts behind the words ‘potential ramifications.’ All murders ramified. Ask Gloria Stewart or Irv Kupcinet.” (325) I learned to write from this man, but it must have been in a past life. I have never read him before. We come from different pasts, yet I know how to write what he writes. His language is, at times, mine. Did we learn from the same teacher separately? Maybe that’s the answer.
• his telling of the anti-story: the leads that went nowhere, the false starts, the background privileged over the foreground

This entry was posted on May 30, 2007 and is filed under history/memory, literature, los angeles.