Author James Ellroy has continually returned to dark themes surrounding women, death and sex throughout his writing career. Now, the author of such thrillers as L.A. Confidential and The Black Dahlia examines his personal ties to those themes in his second memoir, “The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women.”

Ellroy says all of those artistic themes are directly related to his early infatuation with his own mother and his conflicted guilt over her mysterious murder while he was still a child.