Miss Aluminium

'I was self-invented, adapting myself minute by minute, a girl on the run. And yes, built for speed.' At seventeen, Susanna Moore left her home in Hawai'I, with no money, no belongings and no prospects. But in Philadelphia, an unexpected gift of four trunks of beautiful clothes allowed her to assume the first of many disguises. Working at Bergdorf's, she refines her observational instincts. Modelling at a boat trade show, she dresses as 'Miss Aluminium', her arms chafed by silver sequins. Living in 1960s Los Angeles, she meets Joan Didion and Audrey Hepburn, and works as a script reader for Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson, with whom she has a relationship. But beneath Miss Aluminium's glittering fairytale surface lies the story of a girl's insatiable hunger to learn. Moore gives us a sardonic, often humorous portrait of Hollywood in the seventies and of a young woman's hard-won arrival at selfhood.