Miss Aluminum
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020
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.
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“But, though the events she describes are often upsetting, Moore’s touch is cooler than a writer like [Joyce] Maynard’s, her prose spare, her eye quietly ironic...Moore’s writing has the slightly mysterious sense of detachment that she adopted when building her persona, many years ago, though paradoxically this is what makes her revelations, when they come, more piercing.”
The New Yorker — May 2020
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“All of this Moore recounts with — what is that inflection? 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...She came, she saw, she took notes, and she left to become a novelist and a miss-no-detail student of female autonomy.”
The New York Times — April 2020
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“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.”
The Washington Post —April 2020
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“...how a lost child of Hawaii made her way by shrewd observation, self-invention, and serendipity into a very exclusive world. [Moore's] honesty is both timely and courageous.”
Avenue Magazine — March 2020
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“A novelist’s engaging coming-of-age memoir...A captivating portrait of a woman in search of herself.”
Kirkus Reviews — April 2020
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“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 — March 2020