Miss Aluminium: ONE OF THE SUNDAY TIMES' 100 BEST SUMMER READS OF 2020

Description

'I was self-invented, adapting myself minute by minute, a girl on the run. And yes, built for speed.' At seventeen, Susanna Moore left her home in Hawai'i, with no money, no belongings and no prospects. But in Philadelphia, an unexpected gift of four trunks of beautiful clothes allowed her to assume the first of many disguises. 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 Aluminium's glittering fairytale surface lies the story of a girl's insatiable hunger to learn. Moore gives us a sardonic, often humorous portrait of Hollywood in the seventies and of a young woman's hard-won arrival at selfhood.

Susanna Moore is the author of the novels The Life of Objects, The Big Girls, One Last Look, In the Cut, Sleeping Beauties, The Whiteness of Bones, and My Old Sweetheart, and two books of nonfiction, Light Years: A Girlhood in Hawai'i and I Myself Have Seen It: The Myth of Hawai'i. She lives in New York City.

A captivating portrait of a woman in search of herself - Kirkus 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 - Publishers Weekly A striking new memoir ... Through the #MeToo lens, Moore's 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. - New York Times