Miss Aluminum: A Memoir

Novelist Moore (In the Cut) looks back at the tumultuous events she experienced in the 1960s and 1970s. Moore’s childhood, visited in an earlier memoir (Light Years), ended abruptly in 1963, when she was sent to Pennsylvania by her stepmother to live with her maternal relatives. The following decades, chronicled in exacting prose, see Moore attempting to build a life despite being sheltered from the realities of how other people live. Her journey to adulthood included years working as a sales clerk, model, personal assistant, and script reader to at least one movie star, as well as friend to the literati and glitterati after she made her way to California. Despite these seeming adventures, Moore’s saga is far from the stuff of fairy tales, and the shadow cast by the early loss of her enigmatic mother is never far from the page. More harrowing still are the accounts of the cavalier attitudes toward women and sexual assault, which Moore describes ever so matter-of-factly.