Jul
10
4:00pm
Susanna Moore: Miss Aluminum
By TPLCulture
In a brilliantly entertaining and at times harrowing memoir that will occasionally force you to reread certain scenes (“Did I get that right?!“), Miss Aluminum contains author Susanna Moore’s experiences leaving Hawaii after the unexpected death of her mentally ill mother. Landing in 1960s Philadelphia at the staid home of her grandmother and aunt, the book chronicles Moore's winding journey leading to New York City and Hollywood (as a successful model), sometimes befriending celebrity idols and other times fending off brutality before #MeToo was a thing, all the while struggling against poverty and moving towards ambition. Miss Aluminum makes you laugh when you feel you shouldn’t and cry for Moore when she brushes past painful moments that shaped her and her intensely unique career as one of contemporary America’s most critically acclaimed (if under-appreciated) novelists (The Life of Objects, In the Cut, The Whiteness of Bones). In the end, both writer and reader emerge from Miss Aluminum together, battle struck, all the better for having gone through the experience.
Moore discusses with Jessica Allen her much anticipated memoir which has been widely praised throughout much of the English-speaking world.
***
"...a brilliant and deeply self-aware description of being in the present, looking at oneself as if already in the past. " - The New Yorker
"....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
"...The stories Moore has to tell are all delivered with the same calm serenity, which makes for some devastating reading..." - The Irish Times
"Miss Aluminium positions her as a chronicler of Sixties power and pleasure to rival her friend Didion, and, you sense, this model-actress-author has plenty more Hollywood stories to tell. " - The Evening Standard (London)
"In Miss Aluminium, her tales of the Hollywood high life certainly provide giggles and glitz, though the darkness is never far from the surface. The real story is the ripple effect of grief, a woman’s self-invention and the awful deeds of powerful men." - The Guardian
Miss Aluminum "reminded me of everything I ever loved about her as a writer, and now, as happens with certain memoirs, I feel like she is my friend — a very elegant, accomplished grande dame sort of friend, to be sure, one who might lend you a pair of blue velvet Pucci bell-bottoms or a copy of “The Great War and Modern Memory” on your way out the door after tea." - The Washington Post
"Moore deploys a disarming repertoire of sideswipes, gallows humour and raised eyebrows, whether writing about trivia or tragedy." - The Times (London)
***
More about this event’s guest:
Susanna Moore
Jessica Allen
***
*Photo of author courtesy of W. S. Chillingworth
hosted by
TPLCulture
share