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Miss Aluminum: A Memoir
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About This Book
Miss Aluminum is Susanna Moore's revealing and refreshing memoir of Hollywood in the 1970s In 1963 after the death of her mother, seventeen-year-old Susanna Moore leaves her home in Hawai'i with no money, no belongings, and no prospects to live with her Irish grandmother in Philadelphia. She soon receives four trunks of expensive clothes from a concerned family friend, allowing her to assume the first of many disguises she will need to find her sometimes perilous, always valorous way. Her journey takes her from New York to Los Angeles where she becomes a model and meets Joan Didion and Audrey Hepburn. She works as a script reader for Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson, and is given a screen test by Mike Nichols. But beneath Miss Aluminum's glittering fairytale surface lies the story of a girl's insatiable hunger to learn and her anguished determination to understand the circumstances of her mother's death. Moore gives us a sardonic, often humorous portrait of Hollywood in the seventies, and of a young woman's hard-won arrival at selfhood.
Reviews
"Not rue, not regret, not extraneous affect; the reader is invited to supply all of that herself, and the effect is both mesmerizing and sometimes maddening ..."
"Despite these seeming adventures, Moore's saga is far from the stuff of fairy tales, and the shadow cast by the early loss of her enigmatic mother is never far from the page."
"Stories like these are grounded in her unflappable narrative tone and her conviction, shared on the last page of the book, assessing her prospects at age 30, that 'it would be all right.' Given the luminous literary career she had not yet even begun at that age, it seems to be so."
"In Miss Aluminium, her tales of the Hollywood high life certainly provide giggles and glitz, though the darkness is never far from the surface."
"In another author's hands, a Hollywood memoir would be pure titillation."
"Moore's search for stability during a free-spirited decade is a whirlwind of celebrity encounters and a lyrical exploration of the lingering effects of a mother's death."
"One gets a sense that what is revealed has been chosen appraisingly, not out of coyness but, rather, out of something resembling an architect's appreciation of a structure's good bones."
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