"Miss Aluminum"

New from Farrar, Straus and Giroux: Miss Aluminum: A Memoir by Susanna Moore.

About the book, from the publisher:

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.

Learn more about the book and author at Susanna Moore's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Life of Objects.

Writers Read: Susanna Moore (October 2012).

--Marshal Zeringue