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Miss Aluminium, a memoir, Susanna Moore

eng

autobiography

portraitsillustrations

no index present

non fiction

Miss Aluminium

Susanna Moore

a memoir

On her first night in Los Angeles, the modelturnedauthor Susanna Moore slept in a broom cupboard. She was 21, and had been flown in by a producer to appear in the 1967 Dean Martin spy comedy, The Ambushers. Prior to this she had been working as a fashion model and was helping to put her husband, Bill, through college in Chicago. With barely a cent to her name, she arrived to find the hotel was not expecting her. The desk clerk took pity and sent her to the fourth floor where there was a tiny closet crammed with bleach, toilet brushes and mops. There Moore bedded down on a small rusty cot, the smell of ammonia in her nostrils. Despite this inauspicious start, she was "neither worried nor afraid", and soon resolved to leave her husband and make LA her home. Moore's poignant and hugely entertaining memoir Miss Aluminium the title refers to an early modelling job for the Aluminum Association where she was squeezed into a scratchy silver dress and made to carry a cardboard trident covers her unconventional early years before she found her calling as a writer. (Moore's first novel, My Old Sweetheart, a fictionalised version of her life, was published in 1982 while her bestselling 1995 novel, In the Cut, was made into a film by Jane Campion.) This memoir documents her childhood in Hawaii blighted by the death of her mother and the neglect of her philandering father; her escape to her grandmother's home in Philadelphia aged 17; and her subsequent adventures in New York, Chicago and California

adult