Book review: 'Miss Aluminum' by Susanna Moore

The award-winning novelist Susanna Moore, who will be 75 in December, has harrowing stories to tell of her brushes with the famous when she was part of the celebrity scene of the 1960s and 1970s.

Moore was just 12 when her 35-year-old mother died in her sleep. Her father remarried and her stepmother “did not hesitate to let us know that she despised me,” recalls Moore. She fled Hawaii in 1963, when she was 17, arriving in Philadelphia without even a suitcase.

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Moore, author of the acclaimed novels "My Old Sweetheart," "In the Cut"and "The Whiteness of Bones," captures the difficulties of growing up in a conservative era.

Her beauty brought her money and rewards — she was quickly picked to model on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show — but was catapulted into the realm of vile, exploitative men, in an era before #MeToo exposure existed. Moore was raped by a fashion designer and beaten by her husband.

As well as documenting Moore’s heartbreaks, "Miss Aluminum" is also full of humorous tales about the famous. The section in the memoir about her time as Joan Didion’s house-sitter is amusing, with the famous author coming across as particularly grumpy. Moore, and Didion’s Mexican housekeeper, even had to take particular care not to place Didion’s bottles of Coca-Cola on the “wrong” shelf of the fridge.

Moore, who was in a movie with Dean Martin, recounts her affair with Jack Nicholson and writes about her memories of Janis Joplin, Roman Polanski, Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Mike Nichols and Christopher Isherwood. She read scripts for Warren Beatty and her account of his sexism is told with biting humour. Overall, "Miss Aluminum" is a poignant remembrance of a life lived in the shadow of family tragedy, as well as being a wry peak into celebrity narcissism.