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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
"poignant and hugely entertaining ..."
"Moore offers readers a well-written, unobstructed view of what appears to be an idyllic life, ultimately revealing that looks can be deceiving."
"What makes this stand out is its depiction of a specific place in time and the elegant restraint of its prose ..."
"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."
"Moore's voice on the page is sometimes reminiscent of one of her mentors, Joan Didion, in its spellbinding rhythms and effortless transition between the physical and the intellectual ..."
"though the events she describes are often upsetting, Moore's touch is cooler than a writer like Maynard's, her prose spare, her eye quietly ironic."
"Through the #MeToo lens, her measured, superficially judgment-free recounting of her time in the middle of All That can be read as a personal statement of empowerment: She came, she saw, she took notes, and she left to become a novelist and a miss-no-detail student of female autonomy."
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