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Aug 12, 2021 · In Her Memoir The Big Hurt, Erika Schickel Reframes Her Own Turbulent Story. “It was a real struggle to confront my demons and to write a book that is very sad and serious with moments of...
Sep 1, 2010 · Now there’s another woman in Ellroy’s picture, the writer Erika Schickel. She was married when she met Ellroy, finding him in what he calls “the backwash” of Joan and Karen.
Oct 1, 2021 · When she was older, Schickel met notorious crime author James Ellroy — who she refers to as Sam Spade in her memoir — in the green room at the LA Times Festival of Books in 2007. She says he was wound up, distracted, and they made small talk.
Schickel's memoir opens with the 40+ year old's affair with a legendarily strange, compelling older writer--a quite-famous mystery writer--succumbing to a blazing affair that seems fated, conditioned as it was by deeply hidden, unresolved, lifelong emotional wounds.
Jul 20, 2023 · Erika and Ellroy meet at the LA Times Festival of Books and he tells her he’s writing a memoir titled The Big Hurt (which was subsequently retitled The Hilliker Curse, a book far more damaging to Ellroy’s reputation than this one).
Aug 10, 2021 · The second affair—with a thinly disguised James Ellroy (whom she refers to as Sam Spade, the protagonist of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon )—repeated some of the abusive patterns of the first, though it took Schickel many years to recognize that her teacher had, in fact, abused her.
Oct 19, 2009 · The crowd at the Hammer Museum didn’t entirely match the picture Erika Schickel and James Ellroy conjured of the typical Ellroy fan base. “Geeky, white, single, male,” Schickel said. “Obese,” Ellroy added. “A little pasty, a little zitty.” “Malodorous.”
