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Miss Aluminum
Miss Aluminum is Susanna Moore's 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.
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.
288 pages, Paperback
First published April 14, 2020
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1409 people want to read
About the author
Susanna Moore
37 books184 followersSusanna Moore is the author of the novels One Last Look, In the Cut, The Whiteness of Bones, Sleeping Beauties, 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. Her nonfiction travel book, I Myself Have Seen It, was published by the National Geographic Society in 2003. She lives in New York City.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 100 reviews
May 3, 2020
3.5 rounded up to 4 Stars
My penchant for biographies...especially those involving the entertainment industry...as well as the visually arresting book cover- prompted me to read this book. I never heard of Susanna Moore, but that's because she was more on the periphery of the entertainment industry via her romantic attachments rather than successful within it on her own artistic merits. The film icons Susanna found herself orbiting around were numerous: Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, James Stewart, Jack Nicholson, Bob Evans, Art Garfunkel, Mike Nichols, Warren Beatty, and Roman Polanski to name more than a few. She was very good friends with famous author Joan Didion. She even lived at the famed Chateau Marmont for awhile on the Sunset Strip. I loved the name dropping, racy anecdotes involving the rich and famous, and reading about Beverly Hills and the Hollywood elite. The part that bothered me throughout the book was the way Susanna was basically living off of these various men (married or not). They would set her up to live somewhere nice, but after awhile she would meet someone else advantageous and repeat the same scenario. She would also have little affairs even while living with someone. Maybe that was the norm in that Hollywood bubble during the sixties and seventies; anything goes.
Balancing out this gold digger type behavior was the heartbreaking childhood story Susanna weaves intermittently throughout the book. Her mother suddenly died when she was around eleven years old, but Susanna had already been forced to grow up too soon because her mother had mental problems. As a little girl Susanna had the unrealistic notion that she could somehow always be there to save her mother, but the day Mom died Susanna was actually away at a friend's home. Her mother's death haunted and tormented her throughout her life and she submitted to therapy over it. As if this wasn't enough, when her father remarried her stepmother was hateful towards Susanna and her brother and sister. Susanna eventually moved away to live with her maternal grandmother, and through some well connected and moneyed neighbors who took pity on her, helped her with job opportunities. She received trunks of cast-off high end clothing and a job working at the exclusive Bergdorfs in New York City. She dabbled in modelling which led to her travelling to Los Angeles for a bit part in a Dean Martin movie.
Something I heartily identified with was Susanna's intense love of reading. Everywhere she moved, there were piles of books all around her. In fact, there were many days where all she did was read until she had to get ready to attend fancy dinners (that actually sounds wonderful). For a brief time she worked with young children in a school, and later was hired as a script reader. She was paid to read scripts and write a synopsis along with her opinion (if the movie should be made). Later in life she became a writer and taught English to young men who had been in juvenile detention or had recently been released from Riker's Island, in the hope that they could earn a high school equivalency degree.
Her writing style was not exactly geared to my taste, and I occasionally found myself skimming a little bit. I sometimes found it hard to track all the players in her story. Within a chapter she would suddenly vault from the main time period of the sixties and seventies back to a childhood memory. I tried not to be too judgemental considering the challenges she faced in her traumatizing upbringing. She never wanted to share too much in life about it, not wanting people to be sorry for her. We never really know throughout the book how her mother died, but have a vague idea by the very end of the book.
Thank you to the publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Macmillan who provided an advance reader copy via Edelweiss.
My penchant for biographies...especially those involving the entertainment industry...as well as the visually arresting book cover- prompted me to read this book. I never heard of Susanna Moore, but that's because she was more on the periphery of the entertainment industry via her romantic attachments rather than successful within it on her own artistic merits. The film icons Susanna found herself orbiting around were numerous: Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, James Stewart, Jack Nicholson, Bob Evans, Art Garfunkel, Mike Nichols, Warren Beatty, and Roman Polanski to name more than a few. She was very good friends with famous author Joan Didion. She even lived at the famed Chateau Marmont for awhile on the Sunset Strip. I loved the name dropping, racy anecdotes involving the rich and famous, and reading about Beverly Hills and the Hollywood elite. The part that bothered me throughout the book was the way Susanna was basically living off of these various men (married or not). They would set her up to live somewhere nice, but after awhile she would meet someone else advantageous and repeat the same scenario. She would also have little affairs even while living with someone. Maybe that was the norm in that Hollywood bubble during the sixties and seventies; anything goes.
Balancing out this gold digger type behavior was the heartbreaking childhood story Susanna weaves intermittently throughout the book. Her mother suddenly died when she was around eleven years old, but Susanna had already been forced to grow up too soon because her mother had mental problems. As a little girl Susanna had the unrealistic notion that she could somehow always be there to save her mother, but the day Mom died Susanna was actually away at a friend's home. Her mother's death haunted and tormented her throughout her life and she submitted to therapy over it. As if this wasn't enough, when her father remarried her stepmother was hateful towards Susanna and her brother and sister. Susanna eventually moved away to live with her maternal grandmother, and through some well connected and moneyed neighbors who took pity on her, helped her with job opportunities. She received trunks of cast-off high end clothing and a job working at the exclusive Bergdorfs in New York City. She dabbled in modelling which led to her travelling to Los Angeles for a bit part in a Dean Martin movie.
Something I heartily identified with was Susanna's intense love of reading. Everywhere she moved, there were piles of books all around her. In fact, there were many days where all she did was read until she had to get ready to attend fancy dinners (that actually sounds wonderful). For a brief time she worked with young children in a school, and later was hired as a script reader. She was paid to read scripts and write a synopsis along with her opinion (if the movie should be made). Later in life she became a writer and taught English to young men who had been in juvenile detention or had recently been released from Riker's Island, in the hope that they could earn a high school equivalency degree.
Her writing style was not exactly geared to my taste, and I occasionally found myself skimming a little bit. I sometimes found it hard to track all the players in her story. Within a chapter she would suddenly vault from the main time period of the sixties and seventies back to a childhood memory. I tried not to be too judgemental considering the challenges she faced in her traumatizing upbringing. She never wanted to share too much in life about it, not wanting people to be sorry for her. We never really know throughout the book how her mother died, but have a vague idea by the very end of the book.
Thank you to the publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux / Macmillan who provided an advance reader copy via Edelweiss.
April 29, 2020
Well written but fragmented memoir by Susanna Moore. The book rambles between the writer’s early years in Hawaii and Philadelphia and her young adulthood in Los Angeles where she worked with Warren Beatty, fooled around with Jack Nicholson and married Dick Sylbert, the legendary production designer who later became a production chief at Paramount.
Moore ran with a very powerful and very accomplished group at the top of the Hollywood food chain during one of its most celebrated periods. But our narrator seems slightly out of it like the protagonist in a Joan Didion novel (the fast lane anomie feels natural since Moore was close to Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne).
The bits of lurid Hollywood gossip sprinkled through the book are jarring because of the otherwise placid tone of the memoir. Do we really need to know, for instance that the Oscar nominated actress Susan Tyrell provided oral sex to director John Huston most days on the set of ‘Fat City’? Neither figure seems important to the author so the anecdote comes across as gratuitous and needlessly nasty.
Fans of the Nicolas Roeg classic ‘Don’t Look Now’ will be interested to learn that the director was punched in the face at a social gathering for spreading the (untrue) rumor that Beatty’s girlfriend Julie Christie and co-star Donald Sutherland actually had sex during the filming of the horror movie’s celebrated love scene.
I’m probably making the book sound spicier than it is. The celebrity stuff is minimal and takes second place to Moore’s oddly passive accounts of her sexual adventures.
It’s a quick read but not a very satisfying one.
Moore ran with a very powerful and very accomplished group at the top of the Hollywood food chain during one of its most celebrated periods. But our narrator seems slightly out of it like the protagonist in a Joan Didion novel (the fast lane anomie feels natural since Moore was close to Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne).
The bits of lurid Hollywood gossip sprinkled through the book are jarring because of the otherwise placid tone of the memoir. Do we really need to know, for instance that the Oscar nominated actress Susan Tyrell provided oral sex to director John Huston most days on the set of ‘Fat City’? Neither figure seems important to the author so the anecdote comes across as gratuitous and needlessly nasty.
Fans of the Nicolas Roeg classic ‘Don’t Look Now’ will be interested to learn that the director was punched in the face at a social gathering for spreading the (untrue) rumor that Beatty’s girlfriend Julie Christie and co-star Donald Sutherland actually had sex during the filming of the horror movie’s celebrated love scene.
I’m probably making the book sound spicier than it is. The celebrity stuff is minimal and takes second place to Moore’s oddly passive accounts of her sexual adventures.
It’s a quick read but not a very satisfying one.
April 22, 2020
Well, what a life Susanna Moore has led! It's been both charmed and cursed and she doesn't hold back at all. What fascinated me was how many women mentors she found along the way. Older women, all wealthy, who gave her clothing (Chanel at age 20 - I could die of jealousy!!), housing, advice, etc. And they all seemed eager to help her out - why? That I couldn't grasp because they even had their own children.
She sure was in the midst of all that was happening in Hollywood in the late 60s and the 70s and her stories are amusing, to say the least.
Some other reviewers didn't care for the lack of emotion in Ms Moore's retelling of her life. To me, her life was so dramatic that she didn't need to add that aspect to her writing. I loved the book as is.
She sure was in the midst of all that was happening in Hollywood in the late 60s and the 70s and her stories are amusing, to say the least.
Some other reviewers didn't care for the lack of emotion in Ms Moore's retelling of her life. To me, her life was so dramatic that she didn't need to add that aspect to her writing. I loved the book as is.
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April 24, 2020What started as a very interesting account of Moore's childhood--and what could have evolved into an even more interesting look at her coming-of-age as an artist--instead disintegrated into a summary of her (bad) relationships with men, and name-dropping of famous writers and Hollywood celebrities. I recommend reading other books by Moore prior to turning to this one, which ended so abruptly I kept pushing the next button on my Kindle expecting more pages to appear.
Read
December 10, 2020A compelling, beautifully written memoir of someone who has had a star-studded life.
Read
September 14, 2020This is truly a beautiful girl memoir. In fact, it makes no sense without her beauty. This is endlessly fascinating to me--the way beauty can shape a woman's life.
December 9, 2020
Dear God, this was a slog—one I would not have endured for the duration, had ye olde pandemic not curtailed access to library services, resulting in my unfortunate purchase of this book (and thus a grim determination to see it through). The narrative voice herein could best be described as "melancholic robot". This tale's unrelenting dullness is broken up only by its unrelenting bleakness, and it is largely told as if it happened to someone else (at least, that's the emotional impression I get).
Which reminds me—I'd already relegated this author to the "Toxic Authors" shelf, thanks to In the Cut (a bleach-drinker of a book if ever there was one). Had I recalled this sooner, I might have spared myself. But, no! I was drawn in by the siren song of shiny times in '70s L.A. (a la, I hoped, Eve Babitz). And Joan Didion! But, no. I mean, there are plenty of '70s celebrity run-ins and name-dropping, if that's your thing. Basically, it's the largely un-ironic story of the unfair advantages conferred to hot people, so if you're looking for more fuel for that fire, read on! If you're into casual references to animal cruelty (and, to be fair, the occasional animal rescue), read on! If you're into weirdly catatonic memoirs that manage to straddle the line between sociopathy and Woody Allen-caliber neurosis, read on!
I will give it this: it is beautifully written, and certainly not without an often self-deprecating sense of humor. I was just too put off by everything else for these qualities to redeem it.
Which reminds me—I'd already relegated this author to the "Toxic Authors" shelf, thanks to In the Cut (a bleach-drinker of a book if ever there was one). Had I recalled this sooner, I might have spared myself. But, no! I was drawn in by the siren song of shiny times in '70s L.A. (a la, I hoped, Eve Babitz). And Joan Didion! But, no. I mean, there are plenty of '70s celebrity run-ins and name-dropping, if that's your thing. Basically, it's the largely un-ironic story of the unfair advantages conferred to hot people, so if you're looking for more fuel for that fire, read on! If you're into casual references to animal cruelty (and, to be fair, the occasional animal rescue), read on! If you're into weirdly catatonic memoirs that manage to straddle the line between sociopathy and Woody Allen-caliber neurosis, read on!
I will give it this: it is beautifully written, and certainly not without an often self-deprecating sense of humor. I was just too put off by everything else for these qualities to redeem it.
September 21, 2020
I wasn't sure what to make of this memoir. It's like no other memoir I have read and I can't say I enjoyed reading it. I did finish the book; it was more reporting events and names than memoir. I guess I kept reading because I kept thinking that surely the author would eventually leave the surface affairs and events and write with more self-examination. It never happened.
January 19, 2025
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It jumped around a lot but it flowed well and kept up my interest. Sure there was a lot of name dropping but it was done smoothly, not necessarily in a gossipy manner.
I notice that there are a lot of negative reviews, but I just don’t see it, not when I compare it to other memoirs that I have read. Some of those others were so terrible. Definitely worth a read.
I notice that there are a lot of negative reviews, but I just don’t see it, not when I compare it to other memoirs that I have read. Some of those others were so terrible. Definitely worth a read.
July 16, 2020
So! Susanna Moore! She is an author I have longed to know more about ever since I read her novel In the Cut many, many years ago. At the time I read it, I thought In the Cut was the most singularly erotic and dark novel I’d ever read. It made The Story of O seem like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.
I can’t remember anything about In the Cut now, of course, other than the fact that the sardonic police detective who is the book’s anti-hero does this strange gesture with his thumb and forefinger that makes the protagonist shiver with barely repressed lust every time she spies it.
I was so impressed by In the Cut that I launched a massive manhunt for Susanna Moore. She was definitely a soul sister! At the time, I think I was still working for [Name of Famous Celebrity Magazine Goes Here], so sleuthing opportunities abounded.
But alas! There was simply no information on Susanna Moore. She did not appear in any of the Super Sekrit Databases that we celebrity stalkers had access to. Susanna Moore was a non-person! In time, my fascination with answering the question, Who is Susanna Moore? grew larger than my fascination with In the Cut.
Fast forward however many years, and I am procrastinating by thumbing through The New Yorker. The New Yorker in its dotage has become Readers Digest for aging liberals, and the only reason I continue to subscribe to it is to retain access to its archives, which are filled with fascinating advertisements.
But look!
The New Yorker had a review of a memoir by Susanna Moore!
It was called Miss Aluminum.
The New Yorker also had a photograph of Susanna Moore who is 73 years old and spectacularly beautiful:
This photograph is almost enough to make me want to dye my naturally purple hair grey!
Naturally, I wasted no time buying and reading Miss Aluminum.
As it turns out, Susanna Moore has lived an extraordinarily interesting life! She was Warren Beatty’s personal script reader (back in the days when Warren Beatty was a famous roué); married the Paramount studio head who got fired for greenlighting Heaven’s Gate. I guess you’d call Susanna Moore a groupie except unlike most groupies, she retained a singularly anthropologist-from-the-planet-Mars, stranger-at-the-party persona, which gives her an almost Chance the Gardiner innocence and perspective.
Her writing style is absolutely sui genera. Neither bad nor good in the strictly grammatical sense but infused with a strong authorial presence.
Had Marco Polo gone to Hollywood instead of Cathay, you might imagine him writing such a book. It is filled with the most wonderful anecdotes about the Imperial Court and observations like this one:
We were all happy to be at [Famous Hostess]’s dinners, practicing a harmless sociability despite the occasional indifference that the famous or the once-famous or the soon-to-be-famous felt for those who were not famous and never would be famous. It was assumed that despite the occasional spark of individuality, we mostly had the same ambitions, the same conservative political views, the same ideals. It was a world in which it was everyone’s business to please. This supposedly shared turn of mind allowed me to conceal myself as I sensed that it would be dangerous to do otherwise. Not unlike [Previous Famous Hostess-cum-Mentor], [Famous Hostess] was wary of anything that lay beneath the surface, her own or anyone else’s surface. Remorse and guilt, my particular vocations, held no interest for her, perhaps because she found them to be especially wasteful exercises.
Anyway, a pleasant way to waste a day although naturally, I’m deeply ashamed of myself for not cranking out 100 pages on my own Work in Progress or discovering a cure for cancer that can be made out of white Japanese eggplants and Meow Mix.
I can’t remember anything about In the Cut now, of course, other than the fact that the sardonic police detective who is the book’s anti-hero does this strange gesture with his thumb and forefinger that makes the protagonist shiver with barely repressed lust every time she spies it.
I was so impressed by In the Cut that I launched a massive manhunt for Susanna Moore. She was definitely a soul sister! At the time, I think I was still working for [Name of Famous Celebrity Magazine Goes Here], so sleuthing opportunities abounded.
But alas! There was simply no information on Susanna Moore. She did not appear in any of the Super Sekrit Databases that we celebrity stalkers had access to. Susanna Moore was a non-person! In time, my fascination with answering the question, Who is Susanna Moore? grew larger than my fascination with In the Cut.
Fast forward however many years, and I am procrastinating by thumbing through The New Yorker. The New Yorker in its dotage has become Readers Digest for aging liberals, and the only reason I continue to subscribe to it is to retain access to its archives, which are filled with fascinating advertisements.
But look!
The New Yorker had a review of a memoir by Susanna Moore!
It was called Miss Aluminum.
The New Yorker also had a photograph of Susanna Moore who is 73 years old and spectacularly beautiful:
This photograph is almost enough to make me want to dye my naturally purple hair grey!
Naturally, I wasted no time buying and reading Miss Aluminum.
As it turns out, Susanna Moore has lived an extraordinarily interesting life! She was Warren Beatty’s personal script reader (back in the days when Warren Beatty was a famous roué); married the Paramount studio head who got fired for greenlighting Heaven’s Gate. I guess you’d call Susanna Moore a groupie except unlike most groupies, she retained a singularly anthropologist-from-the-planet-Mars, stranger-at-the-party persona, which gives her an almost Chance the Gardiner innocence and perspective.
Her writing style is absolutely sui genera. Neither bad nor good in the strictly grammatical sense but infused with a strong authorial presence.
Had Marco Polo gone to Hollywood instead of Cathay, you might imagine him writing such a book. It is filled with the most wonderful anecdotes about the Imperial Court and observations like this one:
We were all happy to be at [Famous Hostess]’s dinners, practicing a harmless sociability despite the occasional indifference that the famous or the once-famous or the soon-to-be-famous felt for those who were not famous and never would be famous. It was assumed that despite the occasional spark of individuality, we mostly had the same ambitions, the same conservative political views, the same ideals. It was a world in which it was everyone’s business to please. This supposedly shared turn of mind allowed me to conceal myself as I sensed that it would be dangerous to do otherwise. Not unlike [Previous Famous Hostess-cum-Mentor], [Famous Hostess] was wary of anything that lay beneath the surface, her own or anyone else’s surface. Remorse and guilt, my particular vocations, held no interest for her, perhaps because she found them to be especially wasteful exercises.
Anyway, a pleasant way to waste a day although naturally, I’m deeply ashamed of myself for not cranking out 100 pages on my own Work in Progress or discovering a cure for cancer that can be made out of white Japanese eggplants and Meow Mix.
July 4, 2020
An indifferent memoir that seems to be at odds with itself. Unclear if this is due to poor editing or poor writing as there are evident intentional themes here (destructive mother/daughter relationships, dysfunctional families, nascent feminism, painfully disingenuous brushes with zeitgeisty fame) but they are lost in the structure. Perhaps a generational issue, but Moore is so passive that she irks from the lens of today. The ending is also peculiar - is Moore teeing us up for another volume? It hardly seems possible, but then why the dead end? I’m a vulture for Didion morsels, and the Beatty/Nicholson/Polanski crumbs entice but this remains a mere string of sub-par anecdotes and feels like a missed opportunity.
Final comment to the editor : if you anglicise the title, be consistent throughout.
Final comment to the editor : if you anglicise the title, be consistent throughout.
September 2, 2020
A serious effort to get through this. It’s a chronology more than a memoir with a lot of name dropping.
October 21, 2020
I put this book on my wish list after hearing an interview about it with the author on the Spectator podcast (the books issues of which are often pretty good, by the way, and its presenter is not your stereotypical Spectator Tory type, unlike some of the political participants), and a kindly sister gave it to me for my birthday.
In that interview SM sounded intelligent and thoughtful and her life story interesting: raised in Hawaii, then Philadelphia, she drifted into modelling and peripheral Hollywood work of various sorts, and knew lots of famous people, while not doing anything particularly noteworthy herself for the period covered by this memoir (later she became a successful novelist).
I really enjoyed the first part of the book, which unsurprisingly deals with the first part of her life (it's narrated mainly, though not entirely, chronologically). But weirdly, it seemed to me, as she moves to LA and starts hobnobbing with movie and literary types such as Joan Didion (of whom I've recently become a fan), she seems to pick up the fatuous snobbery that you might expect to find in that type of environment, and becomes a bit irritating. There are many pages of anecdotes about dinners at her posh patroness's house, often at the expense of their subjects, and which overall seem kind of pointless. There's also (I find) an airless quality throughout the book, as if she is in a room talking to herself - the rest of the cast are brought in, moved around and expelled without ever getting vivid.
The style is erratic - again, I enjoyed the early part most; as it goes on, she seems to be more and more determined to be elegant and lapidary (I'd guess at an unacknowledged envious admiration of Didion), but she hasn't quite got what it takes, and the result is often starchy and occasionally clumsy.
But I don't want to carp. It has some goodish stretches too - a lot of the later ones seem to be the bits where she reveals some more stories from her formative years. The more or less unstated theme seems to be that she is not sure who she is or what she can be or wants to be, which is perhaps a bit hard on a reader who has no prior reason to care about the answers, especially since the book stops a little before she finds them.
In that interview SM sounded intelligent and thoughtful and her life story interesting: raised in Hawaii, then Philadelphia, she drifted into modelling and peripheral Hollywood work of various sorts, and knew lots of famous people, while not doing anything particularly noteworthy herself for the period covered by this memoir (later she became a successful novelist).
I really enjoyed the first part of the book, which unsurprisingly deals with the first part of her life (it's narrated mainly, though not entirely, chronologically). But weirdly, it seemed to me, as she moves to LA and starts hobnobbing with movie and literary types such as Joan Didion (of whom I've recently become a fan), she seems to pick up the fatuous snobbery that you might expect to find in that type of environment, and becomes a bit irritating. There are many pages of anecdotes about dinners at her posh patroness's house, often at the expense of their subjects, and which overall seem kind of pointless. There's also (I find) an airless quality throughout the book, as if she is in a room talking to herself - the rest of the cast are brought in, moved around and expelled without ever getting vivid.
The style is erratic - again, I enjoyed the early part most; as it goes on, she seems to be more and more determined to be elegant and lapidary (I'd guess at an unacknowledged envious admiration of Didion), but she hasn't quite got what it takes, and the result is often starchy and occasionally clumsy.
But I don't want to carp. It has some goodish stretches too - a lot of the later ones seem to be the bits where she reveals some more stories from her formative years. The more or less unstated theme seems to be that she is not sure who she is or what she can be or wants to be, which is perhaps a bit hard on a reader who has no prior reason to care about the answers, especially since the book stops a little before she finds them.
February 28, 2020
I really like this memoir by Moore. Set primarily in Los Angeles in the late sixties and seventies, Moore a sometime model who seemed to know everybody and had affairs with a number of Hollywood celebrities, describes the filmmaking and artistic scene at that time with a telling eye for detail and nuance. And she is not ashamed to tell all when appropriate. I had just finished reading a book about the making of Chinatown where Moore was mentioned quite a bit (her husband was a set or production designer) and it was interesting to compare her take on Nicholson and Polanski with their description in the other book. Anyways, Moore seemed to cross paths with a lot of famous people which along with her intimate descriptions of her own personal malaise, makes this memoir a fascinating read.
November 19, 2020
I actually remembered several of the ads that Susanna Moore posed for and that appeared in magazines when I was a teen. That does not mean I liked her book.
Memoir? Not quite. I have never read so much name-dropping and gossip in my life. She may have had a very difficult childhood, but she certainly did not strive to develop into a good human being. She latches on to people and has a way to induce them to take care of her and to enable her basement-grade morality. I was more than appalled at the abuse of alcohol, drugs, and sex that supported her vacuous life.
Really. How did this get published? Oh, right. All those famous names....
Drivel.
Memoir? Not quite. I have never read so much name-dropping and gossip in my life. She may have had a very difficult childhood, but she certainly did not strive to develop into a good human being. She latches on to people and has a way to induce them to take care of her and to enable her basement-grade morality. I was more than appalled at the abuse of alcohol, drugs, and sex that supported her vacuous life.
Really. How did this get published? Oh, right. All those famous names....
Drivel.
November 2, 2020
Disjointed and grim, in short a thoroughly depressing and disappointing book.
April 3, 2021
Susanna Moore is an American writer, model, and mover-and-shaker in New York and Hollywood in the 1970s. Raised in Hawaii by a single father after her mother's death, she moved to Philadelphia to live with her grandmother in her young adulthood. Happenstance led to her being hired as a scriptwriter, and hanging out with the likes of Joan Didion, Jack Nicholson, and Audrey Hepburn.
I don't know who this woman is, but since I'm a memoir addict and found the behind-the-scenes info of 1970s NYC and Hollywood pretty interesting, I enjoyed the book. Lots of interesting stuff in here if you like pop culture, music and movies of the 1970s. I also found the tidbits of culture illuminating, in terms of how men and women related to each other, and how famous people treated each other.
I don't know who this woman is, but since I'm a memoir addict and found the behind-the-scenes info of 1970s NYC and Hollywood pretty interesting, I enjoyed the book. Lots of interesting stuff in here if you like pop culture, music and movies of the 1970s. I also found the tidbits of culture illuminating, in terms of how men and women related to each other, and how famous people treated each other.
Read
March 30, 2020I was intrigued by the description of this one but just could not get into it... I saw another review call the writing disjointed - that's as good a descriptor as any. It felt like the book started somewhere in the middle of a story and that feeling never went away, no matter how many pages I read. It felt like a bland disinterested recitation of events rather than a memoir, and I wasn't able to finish.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for my obligation-free review copy.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for my obligation-free review copy.
March 27, 2021
This was an unusual coming of age tale. The author, writer Susanna Moore, fled Hawaii at a young age to live with her grandmother and aunt in Philadelphia. Her enigmatic father was a successful doctor but her mother suffered from mental illness and died mysteriously when Susanna was 11. Thereafter Susanna and her younger siblings suffered at the hands of her sadistic stepmother and from the indifference of their father who rarely tried to help or support them. Because Susanna was beautiful and because a wealthy neighbour sent her packages of designer cast offs, she was able to move to New York and get a job as a salesgirl at chichi Bergdorf-Goodman. From there she became a model, moved to Chicago and eventually LA, where she modeled, appeared in a few forgettable films, married a Hollywood producer, had a daughter and at thirty, became a writer.
The strangeness of this biography comes from the character of the author herself. She writes well but relates most of the strange and unkind things that happened to her in a tone of flat indifference, presumably to show the reader how trauma and lack of awareness molded her younger self. But her passivity makes her complicit in much of what happens to her. She allows herself to be taken care of by a series of wealthy lovers, suffers from the beating of a vengeful first husband and marries a repressed producer who takes up with a close friend soon after she leaves him. Only when she falks in love, has a child and goes into therapy that she is finally able to care enough about herself to leave her husband and start a new life.
The best thing in the book is Moore's description of Hawaii in the 50s before it became just another paradise ruined by progress and people. Also mercifully, she is immune to most of the predatory behaviour of the men she encounters in Hollywood at the time. In fact it is their callous treatment of the young women who come into contact with them that provides the most chilling and telling details of the 60's permissive free love era.. Another aspect of this autobiography that I found jarring and annoying, are the incessant irrelevant tidbits of gossip Moore provides about famous people of the day, gossip which is supposed to give us an idea of the world she moved in, but adds nothing to the book. I think Moore is trying to show the reader what becomes of people who just let things happen to them but at times she falls short in her task.
The strangeness of this biography comes from the character of the author herself. She writes well but relates most of the strange and unkind things that happened to her in a tone of flat indifference, presumably to show the reader how trauma and lack of awareness molded her younger self. But her passivity makes her complicit in much of what happens to her. She allows herself to be taken care of by a series of wealthy lovers, suffers from the beating of a vengeful first husband and marries a repressed producer who takes up with a close friend soon after she leaves him. Only when she falks in love, has a child and goes into therapy that she is finally able to care enough about herself to leave her husband and start a new life.
The best thing in the book is Moore's description of Hawaii in the 50s before it became just another paradise ruined by progress and people. Also mercifully, she is immune to most of the predatory behaviour of the men she encounters in Hollywood at the time. In fact it is their callous treatment of the young women who come into contact with them that provides the most chilling and telling details of the 60's permissive free love era.. Another aspect of this autobiography that I found jarring and annoying, are the incessant irrelevant tidbits of gossip Moore provides about famous people of the day, gossip which is supposed to give us an idea of the world she moved in, but adds nothing to the book. I think Moore is trying to show the reader what becomes of people who just let things happen to them but at times she falls short in her task.
November 18, 2022
Incredibly written - I became so invested in this memoir despite having no idea of susanna Moore ever before. Interesting to read from the perspective of someone on the periphery and close to so many significant people and give such astute observations that transcend it being a “Hollywood” memoir . So many sentences are stand alone knock you down moments in isolation
November 24, 2020
Does this lady want a medal for having met and/or worked with famous people?
September 12, 2020
I came across Miss Aluminum: A Memoir by Susanna Moore when I saw it as a recently read book by someone I follow on Goodreads; the title and book cover were very intriguing to me. I had never heard of Susanna Moore before, but after reading Wikipedia, searching Google images of her, and watching two of her interviews on YouTube, I became very interested in learning more. I was struck with her extraordinary fragile haunting beauty as a young woman in the photo on the book cover, her harrowing life journey, and her dispassionate, almost clinical manner of processing and filtering her experiences in the world, largely through a number of books she has written, many to significant acclaim. The title choice of this memoir is arresting; who has ever heard of a “Miss Aluminum,” and how would that stack up against the gold and silver titles? I have rarely found a book title and cover photo that so strongly compelled me to learn the story between its pages.
Moore narrates her audiobook in a precise, detached, and unemotional fashion, almost as though a PTSD victim wandering, dazed, through a dream. She enunciates beautifully, is easily understood, and a memoir or autobiography read by the author adds a special layer of insight and interest that simply reading the book can’t provide. She also has an outstanding vocabulary, and there were two words I had to look up while reading; it is a pleasure for me to hear the English language spoken with such a diversity of word choice, something I lament appears to be a dying art. The most striking things throughout her memoir are her achingly poignant powers of observation, and her reflections on the past in an often self deprecating manner. It is a lifetime of world and self contemplation, processed and distilled with staggering clarity.
Susanna describes growing up surrounded by adults who view parenting or child care as delivering at birth, providing a roof, bed, clothing, and food, but needing no such distraction from their own grownup life pursuits and passions. Most of the “over 30” crowd she encounters in her youth know what’s best for her without really bothering to find out what it is she wants. Despite the affecting upbringing she describes, her solace in reading many books, reinforced by stories she hears from well funded travelers to off the beaten path locations, awakens a drive inside her to seek out as much of life’s singular breathtaking beauty and moments as time will allow, hungry to personally savor them, almost as though wanting to experience them for those she encountered, whose lives were cut short.
Susanna went through a heartrending period in her life after her mother died when she wanted to rescue anyone in danger for their lives. She had been unable to save her own mother, but for a time after her loss she remained hyper-vigilant anytime out in the world for others in her frame of reference who might need rescuing. She describes the impact of her mother’s death, a powerful recurring theme in her life, years later, “My longing for my mother, ceaseless and untiring, was so fearful that I sometimes wondered if I could bear it. If I was awakened at night by the slightest sound—a dog barking or a branch brushing across a window—I would sit up and call her name, Anne...”
Much of the book is a riveting and meticulously detailed account of numerous celebrities and the culturati populating Hollywood and New York during the 60s through the late 70s; her first hand experiences expose lives few have the opportunity to observe firsthand. The initial chapters of the memoir evoke a profound sadness for her earlier life, later supplemented by an admiration for her ability to survive, and a respect for the multifaceted richness of experience her early adulthood encompassed. I will definitely be reading her earlier books.
#susannamoore
Moore narrates her audiobook in a precise, detached, and unemotional fashion, almost as though a PTSD victim wandering, dazed, through a dream. She enunciates beautifully, is easily understood, and a memoir or autobiography read by the author adds a special layer of insight and interest that simply reading the book can’t provide. She also has an outstanding vocabulary, and there were two words I had to look up while reading; it is a pleasure for me to hear the English language spoken with such a diversity of word choice, something I lament appears to be a dying art. The most striking things throughout her memoir are her achingly poignant powers of observation, and her reflections on the past in an often self deprecating manner. It is a lifetime of world and self contemplation, processed and distilled with staggering clarity.
Susanna describes growing up surrounded by adults who view parenting or child care as delivering at birth, providing a roof, bed, clothing, and food, but needing no such distraction from their own grownup life pursuits and passions. Most of the “over 30” crowd she encounters in her youth know what’s best for her without really bothering to find out what it is she wants. Despite the affecting upbringing she describes, her solace in reading many books, reinforced by stories she hears from well funded travelers to off the beaten path locations, awakens a drive inside her to seek out as much of life’s singular breathtaking beauty and moments as time will allow, hungry to personally savor them, almost as though wanting to experience them for those she encountered, whose lives were cut short.
Susanna went through a heartrending period in her life after her mother died when she wanted to rescue anyone in danger for their lives. She had been unable to save her own mother, but for a time after her loss she remained hyper-vigilant anytime out in the world for others in her frame of reference who might need rescuing. She describes the impact of her mother’s death, a powerful recurring theme in her life, years later, “My longing for my mother, ceaseless and untiring, was so fearful that I sometimes wondered if I could bear it. If I was awakened at night by the slightest sound—a dog barking or a branch brushing across a window—I would sit up and call her name, Anne...”
Much of the book is a riveting and meticulously detailed account of numerous celebrities and the culturati populating Hollywood and New York during the 60s through the late 70s; her first hand experiences expose lives few have the opportunity to observe firsthand. The initial chapters of the memoir evoke a profound sadness for her earlier life, later supplemented by an admiration for her ability to survive, and a respect for the multifaceted richness of experience her early adulthood encompassed. I will definitely be reading her earlier books.
#susannamoore
September 19, 2020
One of the best memoirs I’ve read in a long while. Susanna Moore is utterly fascinating and what a life she has lived. She writes straightforward, not prone to overly lush sentimentality that can often ruin memoirs for me. I’m fond of this genre, but I find that when people write them too early in their lives, they’re more prone to the fallacies of ego. You don’t have to worry about that with Moore’s memoir; she doesn’t spend unnecessary time indulging herself, she lets her story speak for itself, dutifully acknowledging both her strengths and flaws at different points in her life.
MISS ALUMINUM traces back to Moore’s childhood in Hawaii up to the time she was a member of New Hollywood elite circles — she dined at Connie Wald’s famous dinner parties, read scripts for Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson and housesat for Joan Didion. Because Moore did not grow up in the strangeness and privilege of Southern California and was plagued by a melancholy stemming from her mother’s death at a young age, it seemed she was able to move through these intriguing circles and places with a sort of ‘otherness’ despite being an insider in this world herself. I think it was this ‘otherness’ that gave her the gifts of honesty and humbleness required to tell a story about Hollywood, LA, celebrity, family, and the search for a sense of belonging without careening into narcissism. Moore was a woman able to reinvent herself over and over again. She is a writer of numerous acclaimed works. I’ve only read IN THE CUT — which I absolutely loved and read with fervor — but plan to dip my toes into her other writing soon.
P.S. — Anecdotally, for the lovers of 1960s/1970s Hollywood actors, artists, and writers such as myself, this book is divine. It doesn’t get better than hearing Nora Ephron pestered Joan Didion for her Mexican chicken recipe, or that Warren Beatty used to huff and puff before answering phone calls in order to appear as though just got done in the bedroom with a lady friend!
MISS ALUMINUM traces back to Moore’s childhood in Hawaii up to the time she was a member of New Hollywood elite circles — she dined at Connie Wald’s famous dinner parties, read scripts for Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson and housesat for Joan Didion. Because Moore did not grow up in the strangeness and privilege of Southern California and was plagued by a melancholy stemming from her mother’s death at a young age, it seemed she was able to move through these intriguing circles and places with a sort of ‘otherness’ despite being an insider in this world herself. I think it was this ‘otherness’ that gave her the gifts of honesty and humbleness required to tell a story about Hollywood, LA, celebrity, family, and the search for a sense of belonging without careening into narcissism. Moore was a woman able to reinvent herself over and over again. She is a writer of numerous acclaimed works. I’ve only read IN THE CUT — which I absolutely loved and read with fervor — but plan to dip my toes into her other writing soon.
P.S. — Anecdotally, for the lovers of 1960s/1970s Hollywood actors, artists, and writers such as myself, this book is divine. It doesn’t get better than hearing Nora Ephron pestered Joan Didion for her Mexican chicken recipe, or that Warren Beatty used to huff and puff before answering phone calls in order to appear as though just got done in the bedroom with a lady friend!
May 13, 2020
I am a huge fan of #SusannaMoore
I have read her three first books -- fictionalized accounts of her youth in Hawai'i. I think that her fourth, #InTheCut is a spare masterpiece of a thriller. She lost me in her later books content-wise, but she is a masterful writer. Fan-girling like I have for so many years, I felt like I had a sense of her as a person.
Boy, was I wrong. In boldface type.
I jumped to read her recently released memoir @missaluminum the second it came out and in mere pages, I was gobsmacked. This woman has had nine hundred lives, not all of them good, but all super interesting.
In this memoir, she focuses on her young adulthood -- her Hollywood days. She traveled with a tony crowd -- Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne among them. She worked with Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson and Mike Nichols and Audrey Hepburn both make appearances. It's a lot of name dropping, but it feels genuine. She was not yet a writer, but seemed lost -- trying to figure out her place in the world through all of these larger-than-life people.
There is seemingly nothing from this segment of her life in her fiction, which is why it's so surprising. Personally, I wonder how many other lives she has up her sleeve. I cannot wait to find out. *****
#bookstagram #bookchallenge2020 #readeveryday📚 #stayhome
I have read her three first books -- fictionalized accounts of her youth in Hawai'i. I think that her fourth, #InTheCut is a spare masterpiece of a thriller. She lost me in her later books content-wise, but she is a masterful writer. Fan-girling like I have for so many years, I felt like I had a sense of her as a person.
Boy, was I wrong. In boldface type.
I jumped to read her recently released memoir @missaluminum the second it came out and in mere pages, I was gobsmacked. This woman has had nine hundred lives, not all of them good, but all super interesting.
In this memoir, she focuses on her young adulthood -- her Hollywood days. She traveled with a tony crowd -- Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne among them. She worked with Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson and Mike Nichols and Audrey Hepburn both make appearances. It's a lot of name dropping, but it feels genuine. She was not yet a writer, but seemed lost -- trying to figure out her place in the world through all of these larger-than-life people.
There is seemingly nothing from this segment of her life in her fiction, which is why it's so surprising. Personally, I wonder how many other lives she has up her sleeve. I cannot wait to find out. *****
#bookstagram #bookchallenge2020 #readeveryday📚 #stayhome
June 4, 2020
I chose this book because I remembered the author's remarkable 2003 novel "In the Cut".
I liked this memoir of her growing up in Hawaii, living in Philadelphia after her mother's death, and then becoming assimilated into the upper crust of Hollywood and literary culture, based it seems mostly upon uncommon beauty, and a quiet, unassuming curiousity. There are friendships with Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, and numerous others; and while there is an amount of gossipy dishing here, that is more of a sidebar of the story of her own growth and development.
She discussed a lot of clothing choices in her life, with references to different designers, and stretches as a model - I suppose some would be more attracted to, and better informed about this context, than was I. What is apparent throughout is how uncommon beauty opens doors, even when it might be a bit puzzling to the beautiful person herself....
I was disappointed that she only discussed early attempts at writing, and some of her recording of observations and insights; she did not address any of her own novels, and I really missed that, especially "In the Cut".
I recommend this a worth the read if any of these topical areas interest you.
I liked this memoir of her growing up in Hawaii, living in Philadelphia after her mother's death, and then becoming assimilated into the upper crust of Hollywood and literary culture, based it seems mostly upon uncommon beauty, and a quiet, unassuming curiousity. There are friendships with Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, and numerous others; and while there is an amount of gossipy dishing here, that is more of a sidebar of the story of her own growth and development.
She discussed a lot of clothing choices in her life, with references to different designers, and stretches as a model - I suppose some would be more attracted to, and better informed about this context, than was I. What is apparent throughout is how uncommon beauty opens doors, even when it might be a bit puzzling to the beautiful person herself....
I was disappointed that she only discussed early attempts at writing, and some of her recording of observations and insights; she did not address any of her own novels, and I really missed that, especially "In the Cut".
I recommend this a worth the read if any of these topical areas interest you.
January 9, 2021
There are two key components to having a great memoir:
1. Have a life that is worthy of storytelling.
2. Be a competent writer to tell the story.
Without both of these elements, a memoir will fail miserably.
For example, even the most gifted writer, can't make a story when there is none to tell.
Or in the case of Susanna Moore, she has a life worthy of storytelling (or as best as I can tell from this poorly written memoir, but no guarantee), but is unable to effectively convey it.
If I was an English teacher, I would give this "assignment" a C-. She completed the assignment, but really missed the intent--that is to provide a story worthy of telling. Even if you have the story, you still must be able to tell it effectively.
I think she has a story--not sure because every paragraph, anecdote, and chapter started with what sounded like something of interest, but by the end, was unsure with what I was left with.
1. Have a life that is worthy of storytelling.
2. Be a competent writer to tell the story.
Without both of these elements, a memoir will fail miserably.
For example, even the most gifted writer, can't make a story when there is none to tell.
Or in the case of Susanna Moore, she has a life worthy of storytelling (or as best as I can tell from this poorly written memoir, but no guarantee), but is unable to effectively convey it.
If I was an English teacher, I would give this "assignment" a C-. She completed the assignment, but really missed the intent--that is to provide a story worthy of telling. Even if you have the story, you still must be able to tell it effectively.
I think she has a story--not sure because every paragraph, anecdote, and chapter started with what sounded like something of interest, but by the end, was unsure with what I was left with.
June 4, 2020
It's an intriguing and interesting read and I liked the style of writing and the discretion in never airing gossips or other dirty rags.
I recommend it.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.
I recommend it.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.
August 21, 2021
I recently reread "My Old Sweetheart"after finding it on a stoop with many others books being given away in front of a brownstone in NYC.I have begun reading Miss Aluminum and so far it describes and elaborates on some of the events from her other books.I think the cover photo on the book was not a good idea she is not a "celebrity"she is a respected author but that photo implies that she is a "star".My upbringing was similar to hers and I can identify with the fact that she always gets by with help from wealthy friends which annoyed some reviewers .My mother and my aunt were women who got catered to and pampered. My aunt who was a bonafide beauty and not mentally stable was married 4 times to successively wealthier men with progeny scattered far and wide they always knew who would help them .
Having grownup in NYC in the sixties I enjoy all the zeitgeist references to bygone clothes, restaurants and stores .I also envy her being able to vent about past grievances in a memoir . I think some people would find it frivolous. I can empathize with some of the shame and sadness from her childhood into her teen years.I thought losing the ring given to her as a young girl was poignant . I have had that happen and felt the same angst. I am not sure yet if it will stand on its own as a qualitative memoir .
Now that I am almost finished reading I am disappointed .This book doesn't stand on its own merits as a memoir.Most of it is an endless litany of name dropping.A pretty somewhat limpid hanger on with intellectual aspirations is my new assessment of Susanna Moore or at least her younger self.I am younger than her but I also worked in film and the general vapid atmosphere was not a surprise but she just drones on and on about endless dinner parties . I saw names I recognized but none of it was especially interesting except maybe the Dunnes.Every once in a while there is an evocative passage a description of the different herbal and floral scents she encountered while out horse back riding in California is lovely but those descriptions are few and far between.Overall a disjointed disconnected memoir that has some charm but is scattered.
Having grownup in NYC in the sixties I enjoy all the zeitgeist references to bygone clothes, restaurants and stores .I also envy her being able to vent about past grievances in a memoir . I think some people would find it frivolous. I can empathize with some of the shame and sadness from her childhood into her teen years.I thought losing the ring given to her as a young girl was poignant . I have had that happen and felt the same angst. I am not sure yet if it will stand on its own as a qualitative memoir .
Now that I am almost finished reading I am disappointed .This book doesn't stand on its own merits as a memoir.Most of it is an endless litany of name dropping.A pretty somewhat limpid hanger on with intellectual aspirations is my new assessment of Susanna Moore or at least her younger self.I am younger than her but I also worked in film and the general vapid atmosphere was not a surprise but she just drones on and on about endless dinner parties . I saw names I recognized but none of it was especially interesting except maybe the Dunnes.Every once in a while there is an evocative passage a description of the different herbal and floral scents she encountered while out horse back riding in California is lovely but those descriptions are few and far between.Overall a disjointed disconnected memoir that has some charm but is scattered.
July 12, 2025
If you like Hollywood insider memoirs and profiles of celebrities and notable persons of the 1960s-70s, this is an enjoyable read. This landed on my reading list after reading Lili Anolik’s Didion & Babitz, where Anolik quoted and used some of Susanna Moore’s accounts as a reference/insight into Joan Didion and John Dunne.
Moore has a very apt insight into human dynamics and a strong command of language on the page to sketch out the character and qualities of the people she observes throughout her life, which are interesting portraits and insightful. Her anecdotes and memories from her social circles are well drawn and interesting to read, but her structure is a little confusing. She reflects on her early life at various points when speaking of a more recent, later memory or person, and it’s not clear why she makes those connections in that moment, or what common theme causes her to connect one memory with an older memory or understanding of herself and her early life.
It also ends abruptly, so it’s not an exhaustive or full memoir of her life; it’s limited to her early life until around turning 30 when she leaves her marriage in 1978. She provides some resolution to the mystery or unaddressed feelings around the death of her mother when she was about 14, giving you some later reference to eventual and much-needed conversations with her father later in life, but that’s essentially where it ends. It more or less ends on a hopeful note that she knows she’ll be OK after her divorce, but otherwise doesn’t bring you to a better understanding of her growth and evolution as a person or as a writer - the book ends before she begins writing novels and finds her career/vocation. Perhaps that part of her life is covered in other non-fiction works - I admin, I haven’t read any of her other works.
Moore has a very apt insight into human dynamics and a strong command of language on the page to sketch out the character and qualities of the people she observes throughout her life, which are interesting portraits and insightful. Her anecdotes and memories from her social circles are well drawn and interesting to read, but her structure is a little confusing. She reflects on her early life at various points when speaking of a more recent, later memory or person, and it’s not clear why she makes those connections in that moment, or what common theme causes her to connect one memory with an older memory or understanding of herself and her early life.
It also ends abruptly, so it’s not an exhaustive or full memoir of her life; it’s limited to her early life until around turning 30 when she leaves her marriage in 1978. She provides some resolution to the mystery or unaddressed feelings around the death of her mother when she was about 14, giving you some later reference to eventual and much-needed conversations with her father later in life, but that’s essentially where it ends. It more or less ends on a hopeful note that she knows she’ll be OK after her divorce, but otherwise doesn’t bring you to a better understanding of her growth and evolution as a person or as a writer - the book ends before she begins writing novels and finds her career/vocation. Perhaps that part of her life is covered in other non-fiction works - I admin, I haven’t read any of her other works.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 25, 2021
After reading "In the Cut" (just recently, years after it was published) I was interested to read Moore's memoir, having found that novel to be so disturbing that I had to find out what kind of life she'd led that compelled her to write such a confused, conflicting and confusing protagonist, a character that left the reader wondering why a woman would engage in such risky behavior over and over again. And now I know why: Moore is very much like that character. She had a tumultuous childhood and her life was equally tumultuous as an adult and Moore made a lot of bad decisions in real life, luckily none got her murdered.
The problem I had with this memoir is that she wrote it as if she were writing about someone else. It was passionless, she was just writing down stories, enticing TMZ type tidbits (if you want to know what Jack Nicholson's penis looks like, you will after reading page 209) that were so often out-of-order as far as a timeline, that I got confused many times when she'd be describing having dinner with Joan Didion and her husband in one paragraph and in the next she'd be writing about her aunt or her mother or her father.
There's a lot of name-dropping in this memoir and a lot of talk about sex, which Moore seems to be both obsessed with and repelled by. I was bored by the time I reached the last page and I got the feeling that she was too. The final two paragraphs come off like they were written by a wanna be writer junior high student. Rather a waste of time.
The problem I had with this memoir is that she wrote it as if she were writing about someone else. It was passionless, she was just writing down stories, enticing TMZ type tidbits (if you want to know what Jack Nicholson's penis looks like, you will after reading page 209) that were so often out-of-order as far as a timeline, that I got confused many times when she'd be describing having dinner with Joan Didion and her husband in one paragraph and in the next she'd be writing about her aunt or her mother or her father.
There's a lot of name-dropping in this memoir and a lot of talk about sex, which Moore seems to be both obsessed with and repelled by. I was bored by the time I reached the last page and I got the feeling that she was too. The final two paragraphs come off like they were written by a wanna be writer junior high student. Rather a waste of time.
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