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A 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.
"[E]ngaging...Moore takes a wry, cleareyed view of the movie world's pretensions...A captivating portrait of a woman in search of herself." - Kirkus Reviews
"[A]ffecting...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
"Moore offers readers a well-written, unobstructed view of what appears to be an idyllic life, ultimately revealing that looks can be deceiving." - Library Journal
This information about Miss Aluminum was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: © Denise Applewhite, Princeton University
Susanna Moore is the author of seven novels, among them the 1995 thriller In the Cut, which was made into a film by Jane Campion, and My Old Sweetheart, which won the Ernest Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for First Fiction and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Born in 1945 in Pennsylvania, she was raised in Hawaii and worked as a model and script reader in Los Angeles and New York City before beginning her career as a writer.
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